Lightstep

Lightstep is an American software company that provides an observability platform for cloud-native applications. It focuses on distributed tracing, along with metrics and logs, to enable performance monitoring, debugging, and incident response across modern microservice architectures.

Founded in 2016 by Ben Sigelman and other former Google engineers, Lightstep grew out of research on distributed tracing and aims to simplify root-cause analysis in large-scale systems. The company offers the Lightstep Observability Platform, which aggregates traces, metrics, and logs into unified views, along with service maps, SLO management, alerting, anomaly detection, and intent-based dashboards. It emphasizes end-to-end visibility across distributed systems, with capabilities to identify latency hot spots, dependency relationships, and failure propagation.

Key capabilities include scalable trace collection across Kubernetes and cloud-native environments, support for multiple data sources and open standards, and integration with popular DevOps tools. In practice, Lightstep supports tracing across services, installations of service meshes, and cross-team collaboration through role-based access and governance features.

Open standards and ecosystem: Lightstep has participated in the open observability community and supports interoperability through standard tracing formats and interoperability with other monitoring tools.

Typical users are large enterprises and organizations running complex microservices stacks who need granular performance insights, SLO/SLI instrumentation, and rapid incident response.