Ethan Banks had a briefing with LightStep via cofounder Ben Sigelman on December 12th, 2017. Click in the player above hear the audio report.

Who’s LightStep?

LightStep is a performance monitoring software as a service company for cloud-native application architectures, although they will be happy to monitor your monolithic apps as well.

The system works via a local collector that observes transaction data, scrubs it for security reasons if required, and ships it to LightStep’s SaaS engine for analysis.

You can think of them in the APM space, although they describe themselves as “xPM.” From their website, xPM means, “APM reinvented to diagnose anything across all components of today’s software applications.”

Briefing Highlights

Unique performance profiles per customer. Build unique profiles tailored to each of your customer’s specific SLA requirements, giving you a “per customer” view of a complex infrastructure.

Break down transaction components into unsampled microsecond timeframes. LightStep highlights the anomalous records, bubbling them up to the surface so that they stand out.

Figure out what IS or perhaps what WAS going wrong as the application delivery infrastructure changes dynamically.

LightStep integrates with Kubernetes. For example, LightStep can make calls out to Kubernetes to find out information about the local environment.

LightStep ingests metadata from software processes today. Hardware telemetry will become a first-class citizen in the future.

The View From The Hot Aisle

My take is that LightStep is performance monitoring for the long-term. They have skated to where the puck is going, creating a system that excels in cloud-native application deployments, while still supporting those architectures that are transitioning from legacy into the future.

For More Information

http://lightstep.com