ServiceNow expanded its Lightstep observability platform with a new incident response management service that became publicly available on March 14th.
Since ServiceNow acquired Lightstep in May 2021, it has continued to improve the platform. With the new incident response service, ServiceNow now has a range of capabilities that can help organizations not only observe IT operational issues, but also identify them quickly-and provide path to remediation.
In response to the incident is a broad category in IT operations that may include addressing cybersecurity, performance, and availability issues.
“The reliability of customer -facing applications is kind of a do or die for most businesses, and so there’s a ton of strategic importance around reliability initiatives, and the Lightstep brand has always been tied to those. that thing, ”Lightstep co-founder and CEO Ben Sigelman said ITPro Now. “But as part of ServiceNow, we’re moving faster.”
How ServiceNow Lightstep Incident Response Brings Workflow to Observability
Lightstep observability technology provides details on how a given service or application operates. What is often missing in observationalism is the concept of workflow-that is, a set of integrated processes that allow IT operations professionals to act quickly on observability data.
“The workflow needs to be precise and crisp, and that’s why we’re making this announcement,” Sigelman said. “Incident management is the lifeblood of MTTR reduction [mean time to resolution]. “
Lightstep’s Incident Response management service provides a workflow for IT observation data to help IT operations identify and resolve availability issues.
Observability tools can provide information about logging and application performance metrics, according to Rohit Jainendra, vice president and general manager of emerging businesses at ServiceNow. Site reliability engineers (SREs) and IT operations professionals typically use multiple observability tools and then have to manually compile information when an incident occurs to figure out how to fix the issue, Jainendra said.
Workflow automation is a key element of the ServiceNow platform, and that foundation is now being put in place for incident management.
“You can set up rules about who will be notified and when they will be notified,” Jainendra said. ITPro Now. “It brings out the key technologies we have at ServiceNow.”
Identifying Issues for Incident Response Management
The Lightstep Incident Response platform captures alerts and data from multiple observability tools beyond Lightstep’s core observability technology, including New Relic and Datadog.
“We ingest alerts from all these different tools because as we communicate with customers, they use a lot of tools,” Jainendra said.
By gaining visibility into IT operations through multiple observability tools, the Lightstep Incident Response management service is able to build workflows around collaboration, incident investigation, and remediation all within a single service.
Having the service is a core mission of ServiceNow, Jainendra said. Availability issues can be the result of poor performance or an outage, where a service is not actually working. Security problems, such as an attack, or a vulnerability can also lead to service availability issues.
While observability tools can help identify a potential incident, so can user-facing portals with which an organization’s customers interact.
“The truth of the matter is a lot of times the person who notices that there’s a problem is actually the customer, and then they call in and report that issue,” Jainendra said.
“Having the right workflow on how to handle that incoming customer issue, route it to the right team, and make sure the right team is part of the platform that responds right away.”
Routing a particular issue to the right team or person is a core value of the Lightstep Incident Response platform, according to Sigelman.
“There’s a huge amount of value in reducing time to understanding an issue and honest time to being innocent, which is kind of a joke we say inside,” Sigelman said. “There are a lot of teams down the road that have nothing to do with an incident, but the issue is going through their services and if you can help them get back to their work, that’s really a major productivity win for everyone.”