ServiceNow this week introduced a new incident resolution capability on the Lightstep observability platform the company acquired last year.
With the release of Lightstep Incident Response, ServiceNow combined observability and incident resolution into a single platform to help developers and site reliability engineers (SREs) monitor, alert, collaborate, and respond to incidents for quick recovery.
The goal is to reduce downtime by arming these people with the context of service and automation they need to effectively respond to incidents, such as software bugs, power outages, or down networks, says Rohit Jainendra , vice president and general manager of emerging businesses at Service Today.
Context Switching Removal
Jainendra said developers and SREs need to do a lot of manual context switching between different tools to keep up with all their systems.
“What we’re hearing from developers and SREs is that eliminating the‘ context switch ’-flipping between observability, on-call, collaboration and incident management tools-will reduce human errors and will speed up response times, ”he said in a statement. “At Lightstep Incident Response, we provide teams with a single platform that orchestrates on-call escalation, alert grouping, incident analysis, and remediation, while seamlessly integrating collaboration and incident management tools to eliminate ‘context switch’ and resolve incidents quickly. . ”
Major New Feature Post Acquisition
ServiceNow acquired Lightstep in 2021 to extend the benefits of observability to business functions and enable enterprises to leverage their cloud native capabilities. The company plans to extend Lightstep’s capabilities beyond observation, with a mission to be an end-to-end platform for app development organizations. The overall availability of Lightstep Incident Response marks the first major step in that mission.
Ben Sigelman, general manager of Lightstep and co-creator of the CNCF OpenTelemetry project, said it would have been difficult for Lightstep to deliver this capability as just a startup, but has accelerated its development under the auspices of ServiceNow.
How does this work
Lightstep Incident Response works by synchronizing workers ’on-call schedules to a shared calendar, with specific tags indicating who needs to loop based on the type of incident and service affected. From there, collaborators are invited to a dedicated channel based on prebuilt collaboration integrations for quick remediation. Additionally, they can create automation self-triage and self-remediate problems in case they happen again, Jainendra said.
The new tool integrates with leading tracking, observation, and collaboration tools, including LogicMonitor, Postman, Slack, Sumo Logic, Zoom, and more.
For ServiceNow customers, Lightstep Incident Response is natively integrated with the Now Platform, allowing users to quickly respond or escalate incidents to the right team all on one platform and connect incident response to basic operation.
“ServiceNow realizes that the IT Operations model has now changed. Modern agile and DevOps teams cannot wait for multiple levels of support such as L1, L2, and L3 or wait to work through a ticket-based system, ”said Andy Thurai, VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research . “CloudOps is moving towards incident-based events/workflows and multiplication/resolution immediately by service owners rather than on-call support engineers, is the newer model. This ServiceNow initiative is to create toolsets to meet that model. “
However, version one from ServiceNow has limited capabilities, but they have a good roadmap and a good direction, he said.
“The thought of responding to the incident used to be waking up someone, that is in the next escalation chain, in the middle of the night is the only way to exacerbate the problem,” Thurai said. “The newer model is based on incidents/events. You can, and should, directly escalate incidents to service owners who will have the specific knowledge to solve this problem. The DevOps model is about ownership ownership and responsibility for your changes. “
The ability to react quickly sets up the new ServiceNow tool.
Speed and Efficiency
“With the introduction of Lightstep Incident Response, we deliver the all-in-one solution for developers and SREs to act with the speed and efficiency necessary to maintain exceptional experiences for customers who use their applications and service, ”Sigelman said in a statement. “In conjunction with OpenTelemetry, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox project founded on the Lightstep side, organizations will now have the data platform, workflows, and an open approach to standards needed to operate successfully. the highly distributed native cloud services. “
Early use (beta) customers such as Assembly, Lean, and Roambee have already seen the benefits of Lightstep Incident Response.
When it comes to monitoring DevOps infrastructure and services, there are many open source tools that provide great coverage and can be found in a typical team e.g. Grafana, Prometheus, Influx, etc., says Shailesh Mangal, VP of Engineering at Roambee.
“Two things we worked hard for that Lightstep helped us solve were: Get a handle on infra and service alerts,” he told The New Stack. “Essentially they helped us (force) to prioritize alert types by adding additional metadata.”
Another issue Roambee faces is the need to set up an escalation path and automatically follow, he said.
“Due to the small size of the team, it is not possible for us to have a dedicated shift around the clock. We achieve this by sharing responsibility with regular (not DevOps) team members who shine on the moon and rely on alerts.If these alerts are missed for any reason, there is no way for us to identify them until it is too late.At Lightstep, we set up valid escalation paths, and the alerts if not recognized, are rising in the food chain. “
Muthu Gurumoorthy, CTO and co-founder at the Assembly, in a statement said about the Lightstep Incident Response feature, “It has become a gamechanger for our on-call engineers and developers. At Lightstep Incident Response, our teams are empowered and engaged, knowing they are armed with the critical context needed to resolve incidents quickly… ”
New Pricing Model
Lightstep Incident Response is offered as free and paid versions and introduces a usage -based pricing model based on the number of active services operated, Jainendra said. Customers don’t pay next to the seat and only pay for what they use. This allows the entire team to participate in the incident response process and drive a culture of service ownership. Customers can get started right away with a 30-day free trial.
“ServiceNow is one step ahead because they are the SOR (System of Record) with many large businesses in their ITSM solution,” Thurai said. “It’s an easier upsell if the combination of observability and incident management works, but it’s a long way to go. It’s a good start, but we’ll have to wait and see if they’ve done it well.
New Stack is a wholly owned subsidiary of Insight Partners, an investor in the following companies mentioned in this article: Postman.
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