Powered by ServiceNow Inc. its Lightstep observability platform with the general availability of Lightstep Unified Query Language, which promises to increase visibility into Kubernetes-based software applications.
Announced today, Lightstep UQL is designed to help DevOps teams create Kubernetes apps that are born “fully observable,” making it easier to implement best practices proactively around consistency, maintainability and rework using familiar code-based queries.
ServiceNow acquired Lightstep in May 2021 and that platform became the foundation of its application observability offerings. With Lightstep, ServiceNow seeks a “unified telemetry” vision for modern Kubernetes-powered applications that spans logs, metrics and traces. Software monitoring is all about monitoring the health and performance of an application, to prevent any problems from arising.
Kubernetes is open-source software used to organize large numbers of software containers, which host components of modern applications. Because of this, the software is widely used by businesses as the foundation of next-generation apps that can run on any computing platform.
ServiceNow says the sheer scale of Kubernetes is now becoming a problem. Since it is used to power most apps today, finding and retrieving the right data to ensure that applications run properly becomes incredibly complex.
With its new UQL, Lightstep aims to keep things simpler with the idea of ”observability as code.” It gives DevOps teams, those who integrate application development with information technology operations staff, a way to query their applications using a familiar programming language.
ServiceNow says it can help teams gather insights faster than they could with traditional observability dashboards. With a single query language, it becomes possible to query and correlate metrics, logs and traces on demand across thousands of Kubernetes nodes or servers, the company explained.
Constellation Research Inc.’s Vice President and Principal Analyst said. that Andy Thurai that the limitations of existing observability tools mean that many enterprises have no choice but to observe critical apps at the application level, rather than at the infrastructure or microservice level. In this sense, observability is largely treated as an afterthought, he said. It is for this reason that he is impressed with the Lightstep UQL.
“By instrumenting Kubernetes clusters, or containers deployed on Kubernetes clusters, distributed applications can have observability on them from the start,” Thurai explained. “Offering observability as code will help developers adhere to fully observable standards from the design level, reducing friction between DevOps and engineering teams.”
Ben Sigelman, co-founder of Lightstep and now a general manager at ServiceNow, says that observability-as-code can generate more powerful and flexible insights into the health of cloud-native applications. “This is especially important when thinking about modern architectures like Kubernetes, which are very complex and dynamic,” he said. “Lightstep UQL works to ensure that every Kubernetes application deployed is fully deployed and observable by default.”
ServiceNow’s Lightstep continues to evolve as it strives to become a more unified observability platform. Earlier this month, ServiceNow announced the acquisition of a startup called Era Software Inc., which brings log management, data indexing and schema-free storage capabilities to Lightstep.