ServiceNow has released its Lightstep Notebooks, an additional feature to Lightstep Observability, designed to enable faster, more collaborative, and more accurate troubleshooting.
Now more than ever, site reliability engineering (SRE) teams are critical to business stability. According to IDC’s 2022 SRE Survey, more than one-third (36.3%) of SRE organizations cited improved revenues and profits as a primary measure of their teams ’success. The same percentage of SRE organizations cite enhanced customer experience as a measure of SRE success.
Often, both SREs and developers are troubled by troubleshooting production incidents to understand the roots. SREs and developers must work with a variety of tools, data sources, and even time zones, which increases complexity in their path toward resolution.
By connecting diverse data sources, Lightstep Notebooks delivers a unified, comprehensive analysis of applications and infrastructure. It allows developers to analyze data through powerful visualizations while producing a structured view of investigation steps and paths to resolution. Additionally, Lightstep Notebook allows SREs and developers to quickly relieve incidents and prevent recurrence proactively, maintaining a reliable experience for end users.
Leveraging Change Intelligence (Lightstep’s analysis engine), Lightstep Notebooks allows any developer, operator, or SRE to instantly understand changes in the health of their service and underlying infrastructure. This is critical when investigating an incident, collaborating with teams, or quickly documenting studies to be shared throughout the organization.
Key competencies include:
• Data visualizations – Ad hoc charts about systems and their underlying data, including heat maps and time series with trace exemplars, help SREs gain insight into why the incident.
• High data retention – 100% of trace data can be retained for up to three days, giving SREs ample time to determine the root of an incident without any data loss.
• Improved collaboration – SREs can easily share Notebook reviews with colleagues via a shareable link so they can start collaborating right away.
• Reduced complexity – An immediately generated investigative path within Lightstep demonstrates intelligent interactions to quickly and confidently narrow down where the problem is.
• Easy postmortem-SREs can take insights generated throughout the investigation into a postmortem so teams can discuss root issues and take long-term steps to prevent them from happening again.
Damien Mathieu, a staff developer at Okta and a user of Lightstep Notebooks, said: “Lightstep Notebooks responds to needs that arise throughout our troubleshooting team’s journey by providing granular, context -specific data and facilitating the ability to work together to resolve issues in real time.
“Notebooks allow our team to reduce our reliance on logs, which saves us time and resources, and allows us to deliver a better customer experience through a single, unified view of telemetry data. “
ServiceNow acquired Lightstep in 2021 to consolidate and accelerate our position as the world’s leading enterprise platform for digital businesses. With Lightstep, an emerging pioneer in next-generation application tracking and monitoring, ServiceNow helps developers and SREs build, deploy, run, and monitor state of the art, cloud native applications.
Together, ServiceNow and Lightstep aim to extend the benefits of observationalism across the enterprise through digital workflows that convert real-time insights into action for the technologies, people, and processes that provide to digital business.
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