I'm excited to announce Lightstep is joining ServiceNow. For me – and for the team at Lightstep – this isn’t an exit, it’s a shortcut, an entrance, and a massive accelerant as we continue to pursue Lightstep’s mission. We couldn't be more excited! | Continue reading
Simplebet recently launched its first product — Micro-Market sports betting — in September 2020. This created immediate and exponential growth in traffic. “We went from having no public product to building a product that was capable of scaling to handle millions of bets,” said Da … | Continue reading
This walkthrough contains all you need to know to actually use OpenTelemetry in Node. Apply this walkthrough to your application, and you are good to go. | Continue reading
The OpenTelemetry Launchers from Lightstep make getting started with distributing tracing easier than ever. | Continue reading
Today, we’re excited to announce updates that enable developers to identify the root cause of virtually any regression in three simple clicks. This article will take you through the steps on how to identify what went wrong and why, in under 5 minutes. | Continue reading
The reality is that most migrations bog down quickly. This worst practices guide will tell you how you too can end up with a distributed monolith at the end of a multi-year long slog. | Continue reading
A practical guide to observability for developers. You’ll learn, you’ll laugh (we hope), you’ll cry (because you learned so much). | Continue reading
In this post I want to walk you through a recent project I worked on at LightStep: building a Slack integration to make it easier for developers to share insights about their distributed systems. | Continue reading
An Incremental Approach to Observability | Continue reading
Platform teams require dedicated investment and commitment. The investment is transformative not just to software development but also to the entire business. | Continue reading
Telemetry data should be collected without causing unacceptable levels of overhead for your service, and we’re excited to push the state-of-the-art forward for the observability community as a major contributor to OpenTelemetry. | Continue reading
Platform teams accelerate the speed of a business by making it easier for developers to release more features with less risk. Observability expert James Burns walks you through how to build and grow a platform team. | Continue reading
Your developer talent is directly related to the quality of your application and getting functionality out the door. A common path to quickly on-boarding new dev talent is to consider freelance developers. | Continue reading
To the best of my knowledge, I’m the one to blame for the term “span,” at least as it relates to distributed tracing. There’s the old joke: “There are only two hard things in computer science: naming, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors.” | Continue reading
Many engineering teams create some form of a Design Document in the early stages of a new project. At LightStep we do things a bit differently. Rather than Design Documents, we’ve created “Lab Notebooks.” | Continue reading
It’s the third time in a month where your customers are seeing two minutes of error pages — and then it’s just fixed. That’s plenty long enough for them to complain on Twitter, and besides that, it’s just embarrassing ... | Continue reading
I’m not going to tell you there aren’t successful businesses that are built on monoliths. I will tell you that being on a monolith has or is going to limit their success. The rate of change in a monolith is so much slower ... | Continue reading
Migrating from a monolith to microservices can be daunting. Do you move a model into a CRUD service and call it using HTTP? Not if you want reliable APIs on day one. | Continue reading
What’s the best way to run a chaos gameday? How does it help your team? Why should we intentionally create failure? | Continue reading
Our preferred strategy: use observability to demystify behaviors such as latency and gain a deeper understanding of your system. Then move faster. | Continue reading
These three so-called “Pillars” each have a fatal flaw – we need to understand them and ultimately rethink the way we assess observability as a practice. | Continue reading