We use the product for traceability.
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We use the product for traceability.
In terms of code, the tool is very easy to work with. It provides good libraries. The UI is very intuitive. It helps diagnose the traces and map information. It is easy to create new streams and patterns. It is quite easy and nice to use. We use the tool to find the latency and error rate in our services.
The dashboard and graphics must be improved. We export the information to Grafana because it provides better visualization. The performance is a bit slow when we deal with the traces and spams to load the graph. When we start a service, create some spam, and start to put some traffic, it takes 15 to 20 minutes for it to be reflected in LightStep.
I have been using the solution for the last two years.
I rate the tool’s stability a ten out of ten. We never had any issues.
I rate the scalability a six or seven out of ten. Sometimes, the tool gets a bit slower for certain things. We have a very high traffic and a large amount of data. It might be because we have a lot of services. We get more than 100 or 1000 requests per second. There’s a lot of spam. We have more than 2000 engineers using the tool in our organization.
The solution is deployed on the cloud.
I had used Elastic APM in a different company but had very little experience with it. I don't have much to compare with. People who want to use the product must read the documentation and understand what they can do. The solution has a lot of features. Overall, I rate the tool a seven or eight out of ten.
We use Lightstep/ServiceNow to monitor the traces in our distributed applications and microservices. Our services were instrumented using open telemetry and then we sent the data to the configured microsatellites. We also use this tool to send alerts to our slack channels when something is not right according to our expected SLAs. This solution is used primarily for those who are working on call in our teams and need to investigate performance problems and deviations in our production environment.
The benefit of using this tool is to monitor latency and find out possible performance problems in our services.
Some of our services are designed in an event-driven architecture model, and others are called directly by other services; as we deal with billions of data and calls every day, it is really important to have good tools to help us pinpoint problems faster when they happen.
On the other side, it is hard to use different tools for each part of the observability (traces, logs, and metrics), and it would be even better if we could use only one tool for everything.
The solution Lightstep/ServiceNow has a couple of pretty advanced functionalities to help us investigate a deviation and help the development teams have better observability in the environment using distributed and complex services. We can create, save, and share notebooks, and this helps us a lot when sharing issues with the team. When the application is well instrumented with the right attributes, the feature to view correlation and find data that correlates with unusual behavior is very useful.
The design of this solution is not very intuitive and probably could come with more friendly tips for beginners. For example, it is not clear how to list or edit alerts for a specific service. If you have several services for the same account, it is very hard to manage them. If you are not an experienced user, you probably will be a little lost and will not know what to do with all the data on the screen. Also, it would be very helpful to be able to see not only traces but metrics and logs in the same solution.
I have been using this solution for at least one year.
We've never had any problems related to stability when using Lightstep.
You have the flexibility to send the data to internal servers or directly to Lightstep, then the scalability depends on how you configured your structure.
This was the first time that I used a tool to monitor traces. We use a couple of other tools to monitor logs and metrics, though.
The company was already using this solution when I started to work there.
