Lightstep announced the addition of incident response management to their observability platform. The general availability of Lightstep Incident Response provides integrations with common collaboration tools, rotation scheduling, escalation policies, APIs, and a CLI.
Lightstep Incident Response integrates with some common tracking and collaboration tools. These include LogicMonitor, Postman, Sumo Logic, Grafana, Zoom, and Slack. An API is available to enable the generation of connectors for tools without one out of the box. With the acquisition of ServiceNow’s Lightstep in 2021, there is tight integration with ServiceNow’s Now Platform. This simplifies the integration of teams, configurations, and data within ServiceNow into Lightstep Incident Response.
Lightstep Incident Response provides tooling for managing on-call schedules. Schedules are synchronized to a shared calendar to provide a location to see all the individuals currently on-call. The scheduling tool can automatically recommend users with the most free capacity to fill spaces in the schedule. If an alert is triggered, notifications can be routed to individuals via email, SMS, or via the mobile app. The mobile app is available from the Google Play store and App Store and is available with every Lightstep Incident Response license.
Teams can be created to manage both calling schedules and escalation policies. It is possible to add multiple teams to one incident. When a team is added to an incident, the multiplication rules will dictate how the incident notification is handled. In addition to adding teams to incidents, individuals can be specifically added. Lightstep Incident Response supports a Stakeholder role that cannot be placed on-call. Instead, these users will only receive email notifications about incidents in which they are involved.
Automation of common tasks is possible through the interface. This includes automatically inviting individuals to incidents based on tags or setting up automated post mortems when an incident is resolved. Automation can also be done to self-triage and automatically fix common issues.
The release includes a command line interface (CLI) that simplifies the execution of some common commands using Lightstep Incident Response. For example, you can create an alert with a description, priority, and source with the following command:
lightstep alert create --desc 'VPN Service breakdown' --priority 1 --source 'VPN Client'
That alert can be identified by execution lightstep alert ack --alert 'Alert0010006' where Alert0010006 is the alert number that corresponds to the alert being recognized.
Lightstep Incident Response can be integrated on several platforms including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Within AWS, it is possible to integrate with Amazon CloudWatch to send CloudWatch alerts to Lightstep which manages incident response. Similar integrations are available with Azure Monitor and Google Monitor.
The release follows closely a similar release from Grafana. Grafana recently introduced Grafana Incident, which is currently in preview, to deal with incident management and Grafana OnCall to facilitate on-call rotation scheduling. Both services are integrated into Grafana’s tracking interface.
Lightstep Incident Response has both free and paid versions available. The pricing model is based on the number of active services operated not on the number of individuals licensed.
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