Lightstep,
the cutting-edge distributed tracing tool founded by former Google engineers,
announces OpenTelemetry Launchers
which make it possible for engineers to understand complex systems in minutes,
with a single line of code. OpenTelemetry is the vendor-neutral open
source project that is setting the standard for how engineering teams go about
capturing complex system data. The new OpenTelemetry
Launchers connect that data with Lightstep for unprecedented observability
and actionable insights.
"We understand that
not every organization is Google, and that distributed tracing used to be a
cumbersome integration for many engineering teams -- that's why it's been a top
priority for us to simplify things as much as possible," said Ben Sigelman, CEO
and Co-Founder of Lightstep. "We've been working hard alongside Google,
Microsoft, Splunk, and other great companies to set the standard for how to
collect data from distributed systems with the OpenTelemetry project. And with
our new OpenTelemetry Launchers,
anyone can gather and gain insight from that data with only one line of code."
Lightstep aims to
address the challenges around performance and root cause analysis introduced by
emerging technologies such as microservices and serverless. Research from Lightstep highlights that while
over 90% of software engineers currently use or plan to adopt microservices,
almost all of them find it challenging. In Gartner's report Innovation Insight for Microservices,
they write "microservices enable unprecedented agility and scalability" but
note that "the architecture causes significant cultural disruption." Gartner
goes on to state that "microservices adoption efforts are destined to fail if
you don't make corresponding changes to traditional application development and
data management."
This shift to
distributed architectures is changing how performance data is collected, away
from the proprietary agents used by more traditional APM and monitoring
vendors, toward open source tooling. In their report Critical
Capabilities for Application Performance Monitoring, Gartner also writes that "by 2025, 50%
of new, cloud-native application monitoring will use open-source
instrumentation, instead of vendor-specific agents for improved
interoperability, which is an increase from 5% in 2019."
OpenTelemetry's top
contributors are leading companies such as Google, Microsoft, Lightstep,
Splunk, Uber, New Relic, Honeycomb and others. It comes with built-in,
high-quality instrumentation for dozens of popular libraries in each language,
out of the box. This makes it possible to get up and running with distributed
tracing in minutes when connecting with Lightstep's OpenTelemetry Launchers, enabling engineers to gain immediate, accessible end-to-end visibility into distributed
services and their dependencies.
Lightstep is being able to see
where you were blind before. It's the difference between never finding the
problem or never really being able to understand what's going on, and
instantaneously seeing all the relevant information. -- Albert Strasheim, Director of Engineering at Segment
Not
only does Lightstep help us with understanding the edges of our system, it
allows us to monitor and understand new usage patterns that we want to keep a
closer eye on to ensure we have an optimal customer experience. It shows us
exactly where things are slow, what changes we need to make to realize a quick
ROI, and specifically how our customers are experiencing our platform. -- Philip
Zeyliger, Software Engineer at Airtable