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LightStep Tracing Introduced

LightStep unveiled LightStep Tracing, a fast way for developers and DevOps to adopt best-of-breed distributed tracing, a technique used to dramatically improve the performance and reliability of modern distributed architectures, like microservices and serverless.

LightStep Tracing is both easier to integrate and more powerful than any other distributed tracing solution, and it is now generally available as a public beta.

LightStep Tracing delivers the sophisticated analytical capabilities of LightStep’s powerful [x]PM performance monitoring product in a package designed to accelerate tracing adoption across an engineering organization.

Ben Sigelman, LightStep co-founder and CEO, said: “LightStep Tracing is much more than a way to search and visualize distributed traces: with access to 100% of the unsampled data, unlimited cardinality, automatic pattern detection, mobile and web support, and OpenTracing-native instrumentation, it redraws the lines around APM and observability. We are excited about the value this new best-of-breed offering will bring to teams adopting distributed tracing.”

LightStep Tracing incorporates innovations previously found only in LightStep [x]PM, but in a package that’s right-sized for individual teams within the enterprise. LightStep [x]PM serves market-leading customers including Lyft, Twilio, Github, Airtable, BigCommerce, Medium, Segment, Zalando, and many others.

LightStep Tracing Features:

- LightStep Tracing is a pure SaaS solution without any infrastructure burdens for developers. Data is safe and secure.

- LightStep Tracing leverages the same high-performance architecture as LightStep [x]PM which enables it to collect 100% of the performance data. This translates into unlimited cardinality and real-time indexing and search, so teams never miss a performance outlier and reduce mean time to incident resolution.

- Dynamic system diagrams that visually summarize the bottlenecks affecting any aspect of a microservices architecture.

- Real-time performance histograms enable organizations to understand what’s normal and what’s not, all with an unprecedented level of analytical detail.

- “Snapshots”: Durable, shareable snapshots of system behavior that explain performance anomalies via statistical summaries of thousands of relevant traces. Snapshots are an industry first, providing an unprecedented level of detail and analytical depth, even for events in the past.

- Works with Go, Java, Objective C, C#, .NET, JavaScript, five other languages, all major mobile operating systems, cloud providers, plus microservice, serverless and IOT platforms.

- Native integration into leading service mesh technologies including Envoy and Istio.

- LightStep Tracing provides developers with step-by-step instructions and validations along the way, both guiding and accelerating instrumentation and tracing adoption.

- LightStep Tracing visualizes service-to-service interactions to provide a deeper understanding of complex system behavior spanning web, mobile, microservices, serverless, and monoliths.

- With an easy to use interface, streamlined instrumentation based on OpenTracing, individuals and teams can get up and running with distributed tracing in minutes. With no lock-in to a bloated platform, LightStep Tracing makes best-of-breed, unsampled distributed tracing available for everyone.

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LightStep Tracing Introduced

LightStep unveiled LightStep Tracing, a fast way for developers and DevOps to adopt best-of-breed distributed tracing, a technique used to dramatically improve the performance and reliability of modern distributed architectures, like microservices and serverless.

LightStep Tracing is both easier to integrate and more powerful than any other distributed tracing solution, and it is now generally available as a public beta.

LightStep Tracing delivers the sophisticated analytical capabilities of LightStep’s powerful [x]PM performance monitoring product in a package designed to accelerate tracing adoption across an engineering organization.

Ben Sigelman, LightStep co-founder and CEO, said: “LightStep Tracing is much more than a way to search and visualize distributed traces: with access to 100% of the unsampled data, unlimited cardinality, automatic pattern detection, mobile and web support, and OpenTracing-native instrumentation, it redraws the lines around APM and observability. We are excited about the value this new best-of-breed offering will bring to teams adopting distributed tracing.”

LightStep Tracing incorporates innovations previously found only in LightStep [x]PM, but in a package that’s right-sized for individual teams within the enterprise. LightStep [x]PM serves market-leading customers including Lyft, Twilio, Github, Airtable, BigCommerce, Medium, Segment, Zalando, and many others.

LightStep Tracing Features:

- LightStep Tracing is a pure SaaS solution without any infrastructure burdens for developers. Data is safe and secure.

- LightStep Tracing leverages the same high-performance architecture as LightStep [x]PM which enables it to collect 100% of the performance data. This translates into unlimited cardinality and real-time indexing and search, so teams never miss a performance outlier and reduce mean time to incident resolution.

- Dynamic system diagrams that visually summarize the bottlenecks affecting any aspect of a microservices architecture.

- Real-time performance histograms enable organizations to understand what’s normal and what’s not, all with an unprecedented level of analytical detail.

- “Snapshots”: Durable, shareable snapshots of system behavior that explain performance anomalies via statistical summaries of thousands of relevant traces. Snapshots are an industry first, providing an unprecedented level of detail and analytical depth, even for events in the past.

- Works with Go, Java, Objective C, C#, .NET, JavaScript, five other languages, all major mobile operating systems, cloud providers, plus microservice, serverless and IOT platforms.

- Native integration into leading service mesh technologies including Envoy and Istio.

- LightStep Tracing provides developers with step-by-step instructions and validations along the way, both guiding and accelerating instrumentation and tracing adoption.

- LightStep Tracing visualizes service-to-service interactions to provide a deeper understanding of complex system behavior spanning web, mobile, microservices, serverless, and monoliths.

- With an easy to use interface, streamlined instrumentation based on OpenTracing, individuals and teams can get up and running with distributed tracing in minutes. With no lock-in to a bloated platform, LightStep Tracing makes best-of-breed, unsampled distributed tracing available for everyone.

The Latest

For years, infrastructure teams have treated compute as a relatively stable input. Capacity was provisioned, costs were forecasted, and performance expectations were set based on the assumption that identical resources behaved identically. That mental model is starting to break down. AI infrastructure is no longer behaving like static cloud capacity. It is increasingly behaving like a market ...

Resilience can no longer be defined by how quickly an organization recovers from an incident or disruption. The effectiveness of any resilience strategy is dependent on its ability to anticipate change, operate under continuous stress, and adapt confidently amid uncertainty ...

Mobile users are less tolerant of app instability than ever before. According to a new report from Luciq, No Margin for Error: What Mobile Users Expect and What Mobile Leaders Must Deliver in 2026, even minor performance issues now result in immediate abandonment, lost purchases, and long-term brand impact ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become the dominant force shaping enterprise data strategies. Boards expect progress. Executives expect returns. And data leaders are under pressure to prove that their organizations are "AI-ready" ...

Agentic AI is a major buzzword for 2026. Many tech companies are making bold promises about this technology, but many aren't grounded in reality, at least not yet. This coming year will likely be shaped by reality checks for IT teams, and progress will only come from a focus on strong foundations and disciplined execution ...

AI systems are still prone to hallucinations and misjudgments ... To build the trust needed for adoption, AI must be paired with human-in-the-loop (HITL) oversight, or checkpoints where humans verify, guide, and decide what actions are taken. The balance between autonomy and accountability is what will allow AI to deliver on its promise without sacrificing human trust ...

More data center leaders are reducing their reliance on utility grids by investing in onsite power for rapidly scaling data centers, according to the Data Center Power Report from Bloom Energy ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 21, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses AI-driven NetOps ... 

Enterprise IT has become increasingly complex and fragmented. Organizations are juggling dozens — sometimes hundreds — of different tools for endpoint management, security, app delivery, and employee experience. Each one needs its own license, its own maintenance, and its own integration. The result is a patchwork of overlapping tools, data stuck in silos, security vulnerabilities, and IT teams are spending more time managing software than actually getting work done ...

2025 was the year everybody finally saw the cracks in the foundation. If you were running production workloads, you probably lived through at least one outage you could not explain to your executives without pulling up a diagram and a whiteboard ...