ServiceNow broadens Lightstep portfolio

ServiceNow says that Lightstep is extending beyond observability and creating a differentiated portfolio for app development with the general availability of Lightstep Incident Response, helping make organisations’ digital products and services more reliable and resilient. Lightstep Incident Response will enable developers and site reliability engineers (SRE) to reduce downtime by arming them with the service context and automation they need to effectively respond to incidents, such as a software bug, power outage, or down network. 

“What we’re hearing from developers and SREs is that eliminating ‘context switch’ – flipping between observability, on-call, collaboration and incident management tools – would reduce human errors and speed up response times,” said Rohit Jainendra, vice president and general manager of emerging businesses at ServiceNow. "With Lightstep Incident Response, we are providing teams with a single platform that orchestrates on-call escalation, alert grouping, incident analysis, and remediation, while seamlessly integrating with collaboration and incident management tools to eliminate ‘context switch’ and resolve incidents with speed." 

ServiceNow acquired Lightstep in 2021 to extend the benefits of observability across business functions and enable enterprises to increase their cloud-native capabilities. The company plans to extend Lightstep’s capabilities beyond observability, with the mission of becoming an end-to-end platform for app development organizations. The general availability of Lightstep Incident Response marks the first major step on that mission. 

Lightstep Incident Response manages an organization’s on-call rotations by synchronizing everyone’s schedule onto a shared calendar, with specific tags that indicate who needs to be looped in based on the nature of the incident and the service that is impacted. From there, collaborators are invited to a dedicated channel based on prebuilt collaboration integrations for quick remediation. Additionally, they can create automations that self-triage and self-remediate problems should they reoccur.  

Lightstep Incident Response seamlessly integrates with leading monitoring, observability and collaboration tools, including LogicMonitor, Postman, Sumo Logic, Zoom, and more, streamlining the incident response process.  For ServiceNow customers, Lightstep Incident Response natively integrates with the Now Platform, allowing users to quickly respond to or escalate incidents to the right team all on one platform and connecting incident response to core operations – putting the entire power of their organization behind the end-customer experience.    

“Combining real-time observability and incident response gives on-call engineers powerful insight into the changes that matter and the ability to act quickly,” said Ben Sigelman, general manager of Lightstep and co-creator of OpenTelemetry. “With the introduction of Lightstep Incident Response, we are delivering the all-in-one solution for developers and SREs to act with the speed and efficiency necessary to maintain exceptional experiences for customers using their applications and services. In combination with OpenTelemetry, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox project founded in part by Lightstep, organizations will now have the data platform, workflows, and an open standards approach necessary to successfully operate highly distributed cloud native services.” 

What Customers are Saying about Lightstep Incident Response  

Today’s general availability follows an early access period that included hundreds of trials and customers like Assembly, DataVox, Lean, and Roambee who are already realizing the benefits of Lightstep Incident Response.  

“Lightstep Incident Response has enabled Assembly to connect our SRE teams across different geographies and time zones so they can quickly convert insights into action while also maintaining the reliability and continuity of our critical services,” said Muthu Gurumoorthy, CTO and co-founder at Assembly. “It has been a gamechanger for our on-call engineers and developers. With Lightstep Incident Response, our team is empowered and engaged, knowing that they are armed with the critical context needed to resolve incidents at speed, and deliver the seamless experiences customers have come to expect from us.” 

“Lightstep Incident Response has enabled our on-call technicians to more quickly respond to customer emergency messages,” said John Dineen, Director of EE Services at DataVox. “Our on-call engineers can be notified of an alert through phone call, SMS, mobile app, or email, which is a game-changer. The multiple avenues of communication, as well as the automation capabilities that Lightstep Incident Response provides, has empowered our team to resolve incidents and alerts with greater speed and visibility.” 

“Lightstep has enabled us to maintain a culture of proactivity and predictable incident response within our company,” said Tilak Joshi, CEO of Lean. “Where there used to be a risk for whitespace between an incident happening and being resolved, our team is able to quickly learn about any new incidents, respond quickly, and ensure a reliable experience for our partners and users." 

“When it comes to managing global supply chain logistics for mission critical deliveries, such as COVID-19 vaccines or food assistance to those in need, customers rely on Roambee’s real-time, sensor-driven supply chain visibility platform,” said Shailesh Mangal, VP of engineering at Roambee. “Lightstep Incident Response has helped our teams resolve any issues that arise with greater speed and agility, so we can keep the delivery of these lifesaving products on track, in condition, and get them into the hands of those who need them most.”