ServiceNow’s Lightstep Incident Response customers will pay for usage rather than users, as the vendor faces competitors in multiple categories.
The SaaS offer was derived from observability vendor Lightstep’s acquisition of ServiceNow last year, but Lightstep did not market an incident response tool. Pieces from ServiceNow’s IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations management tools from its broader Now Platform are integrated into the new product to create incident management workflows, but the LightStep product is not requires purchase of the Now platform to use. Unlike the larger platform, Lightstep SaaS’s self-service incident response is also not priced according to the number of people using it-it’s free for up to 30 days for up to two managed services, and costs $ 40 per month for each actively operated service thereafter.
Pay-as-you-go SaaS pricing isn’t new to the market, but it’s relatively new for ServiceNow, as it faces the same pressure that appeals to modern DevOps teams as other established IT vendors, including Splunk.
“Most vendors are willing to go that route now because that’s where the software industry will go,” said Andy Thurai, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research. “[ServiceNow] realizes that the model has changed – it’s not based on tickets. It’s event -based, incident -based today, and they’re trying to build tool sets to address that. “
Early adopters of Lightstep Incident Response included at least one company outside the traditional serviceNow customer base. Assembly, an employee recognition software startup in Santa Monica, Calif., Signed up to use the product during early availability in late 2021; Assembly is not a customer of the Now Platform. The 50-employee company also considers well-known incident response vendor, PagerDuty, to offer more features such as fine alert routing, but Lightstep Incident Response beats it in price.
“They cover the basics very well, from notifying when an incident happens and where you need to respond, and you can have a team work with it and do a post-mortem,” Muthu Gurumoorthy said. , CTO and co-founder in the Assembly. “For a junior developer coming into the platform, it’s much simpler [than PagerDuty] understand. “
Incident response battleground brews around auto-remediation
Lightstep Incident Response is still an early stage of the product at this point, with additional integrations to the Now Platform planned that will allow for automated incident remediation, along with planned integrations into DevOps pipelines in through Atlassian’s Jira issue tracking software, among others.
Atlassian, in particular, has directly challenged ServiceNow over the past 18 months with its own enterprise service management forays, historically dominating a ServiceNow territory. Atlassian added its own configuration management database (CMDB) and attacked ServiceNow’s ITSM based on its complexity and price. Atlassian’s Opsgenie acquisition and Jira Service Management products now offer connections to software development workflows, closing the feedback loop between production operations and developers who are increasingly responsible for troubleshooting their own application.
Here, ServiceNow can combine Lightstep’s observability tooling and its own AIOps automation within the Incident Response service as it ages, while Atlassian doesn’t have its own in-house observability tooling. It will also help ServiceNow stand up against PagerDuty, which acquired Rundeck for workflow automation in response to the incident in 2020; and Splunk, which got incident response IP with VictorOps in 2018.
It’s too early to say whether ServiceNow’s incident response strategy will pay off, but analysts say no vendor has yet sewn the market for automated incident response that combines workflow tooling with observability data.
“Version one has limited capabilities, but based on what I’ve seen, they have a good roadmap and good direction,” Thurai said. “The mentality of responding to the incident was previously,‘ wake someone up in the middle of the night to solve the problem, ’but [there are opportunities around] routing of incidents based on service ownership and auto remediation of incidents. … I don’t think there are any competitors yet. “
Competitive complications as IT disciplines converge
Splunk, which has had its own struggle with the transition from enterprise licensing to pay-as-you-go models, has integrated VictorOps, now called Splunk On-Call, with its Splunk products Enterprise and Splunk Cloud and added integrations with Jira, Microsoft Teams and Slack, but the product didn’t make waves.
“I haven’t heard a ton about it, even on Splunk calls,” said Jim Mercer, an analyst at IDC. “When I think of this space, the first thing I think of is PagerDuty.”
While many IT disciplines converge amid digital transformation and “you build it, you run it” skills, Lightstep Incident Response will also run against observability tools such as AppDynamics, which also offers AIOps- driven automatic remediation for incident response, New Relic, Datadog and Dynatrace, Mercer said.
The Assembly uses Datadog, and Gurumoorthy said he expects to see its improved integration and response to the Lightstep Incident, which currently requires manual effort to set up.
“We use Datadog a lot, and it’s hard to replace,” he said. “But we can consider Lightstep [observability] and ServiceNow as we can see [integration] improvement. “
While ServiceNow keeps Lightstep independent from the Now Platform, it can also bring new customers to it, or expand existing customer usage, according to Mercer.
“If you’re a ServiceNow customer, but you have modern teams that practice observability and so on, and you want to combine it all, it will definitely give you an enticing option,” he said.
Beth Pariseau, senior news writer at TechTarget, is an award-winning veteran of IT journalism. He will be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @PariseauTT.