ServiceNow has added an incident management platform based on the Lightstep observability platform it acquired last year to its software-as-a-service (SaaS) portfolio.
Ben Sigelman, Lightstep general manager at ServiceNow, said that Lightstep Incident Response gives DevOps teams access to observability tools that, through the self-service portal, allow them to pinpoint the root cause of any incident faster. It combines the ability to orchestrate on-call escalation, alert grouping, incident analysis and remediation into a range of collaboration and incident management tools.
That approach will make the Lightstep observability platform more accessible through the cloud service, Sigelman said. The Lightstep observability platform itself is based on a time-series database capable of processing a trillion events per day.
Lightstep Incident Response manages the organization’s call cycles by synchronizing schedules via a shared calendar, with specific tags that indicate who needs to loop based on the type of incident and services affected. Team members are invited to a dedicated channel based on pre -made collaboration arrangements for rapid remediation. Over time, they can create automated processes that self-triage and self-remediate problems as they recur. The platform also integrates with tracking, observation and collaboration tools such as LogicMonitor, Postman, Slack, Sumo Logic and Zoom.
Lightstep Incident Response is now generally available in both free and paid versions. Pricing is based on the use of actively managed services rather than through a seat license.
Lightstep Incident Response also natively integrates with the Now Platform developed by ServiceNow for IT service management (ITSM). That integration will allow organizations to more easily integrate ITSM and DevOps workflows, Sigelman said.
Observability platforms aggregate the collection of logs, metrics and traces in a way that makes it possible for DevOps teams to query that data. The goal is to make it easier for DevOps teams to identify anomalies that could interfere with the application environment. Both of those tools, however, also allow DevOps teams to pinpoint the root of an IT incident more quickly. Today, many organizations regularly convene “war rooms” that require IT teams to thoroughly identify the root of an issue through the elimination process; it can take days — sometimes even weeks — to complete.
With more applications becoming instrumental — thanks, in part, to the availability of open source agent software — Sigelman said observability platforms will play an important role in helping automate incident management processes. Prior to the acquisition of ServiceNow, Lightstep team members played a role in creating both OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry open source projects for collecting traces, metrics and logs. Today, OpenTelemetry is a sandbox-level project managed under the auspice of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
With the deployment of more microservice-based applications, the percentage of applications used will increase significantly. It is not possible to manage these applications without any level of instrumentation. The issue now, of course, is to determine to what degree will also be instrumental in many of the monolithic applications already running in those same environments.