Nobl9, a Boston-based software reliability platform
startup, and Lightstep, the San Francisco-based observability company
that has pioneered the cutting-edge practice of ‘distributed tracing,' announced an integration partnership in which the two companies will add
support for the Lightstep core distributed tracing technology to Nobl9's SLO
platform. The effort enables organizations to establish service level
objectives from performance data captured through distributed traces in the
Lightstep platform.
Distributed tracing, the technology at the heart
of the Lightstep observability platform, is used to rapidly pinpoint the causes
of failures and poor performance across the deeply complex dependencies among
services, teams and workloads in modern production systems. SLOs-service level
objectives-are strong, understandable goals that applications will run reliably
and with adequate performance. What makes SLOs uniquely valuable and powerful
is that they encode technical and business priorities in terms that are easy to
understand, built by a collaborative team of application developers, product
managers, IT operators and other business stakeholders. Using distributed
tracing data as an input to the SLO process gives application developers and
operators the ability to construct SLOs that reflect service dependencies and
validate them with live telemetry from the application.
Users of services-whether they are human or
other services-have expectations about how reliable these services are, and
those expectations vary by the types of services being requested, the time of
day or year those services are being requested, and how reliable similar
services are from competitors. Good SLOs are built on the economic value to the
organization of successful service delivery. The Nobl9 platform, presently in
private beta, democratizes the process of managing SLOs so that engineers can
make objective reliability decisions based on data, not conjecture or
organizational folklore. When SLOs are at risk, Lightstep provides explanations
of what has changed to help engineers get things back on track.
"In order for software to fulfill its promise as
the only sustainable source of competitive differentiation, it has to be
reliable," said Marcin Kurc, CEO of Nobl9. "Site reliability engineering is the
means by which reliable software is built and run, and SLOs are the foundation
upon which SRE is built. That's what we're creating at Nobl9: a platform to
help organizations create and manage SLOs that deliver positive reliability
experience downstream, without over-provisioning or other capital-inefficient
tactics that deliver negative ROI for the organization."
"Engineers in charge of delivering reliable
software crave management systems that are elegant, flexible and save them
time," said Ben Sigelman, CEO and cofounder at Lightstep. "Engineers don't want
another maintenance headache, and they don't want another framework or vendor
that makes them bend over backwards. Lightstep and Nobl9 see the world the same
way, and by integrating our systems, we're giving our customers access to
another, powerful value proposition for distributed tracing."
The integration will be made available to
participants in the private beta program for the Nobl9 SLO platform.