ServiceNow announced that Lightstep is extending beyond observability and creating a differentiated portfolio for app development with the general availability of Lightstep Incident Response, helping make organizations’ digital products and services more reliable and resilient.

Lightstep Incident Response will enable developers and site reliability engineers (SRE) to reduce downtime by arming them with the service context and automation they need to effectively respond to incidents, such as a software bug, power outage, or down network.

“What we’re hearing from developers and SREs is that eliminating ‘context switch’ – flipping between observability, on‑call, collaboration and incident management tools – would reduce human errors and speed up response times,” said Rohit Jainendra, VP and GM of emerging businesses at ServiceNow. "With Lightstep Incident Response, we are providing teams with a single platform that orchestrates on‑call escalation, alert grouping, incident analysis, and remediation, while seamlessly integrating with collaboration and incident management tools to eliminate ‘context switch’ and resolve incidents with speed."

ServiceNow acquired Lightstep in 2021 to extend the benefits of observability across business functions and enable enterprises to increase their cloud‑native capabilities. The company plans to extend Lightstep’s capabilities beyond observability, with the mission of becoming an end‑to‑end platform for app development organizations. The general availability of Lightstep Incident Response marks the first major step on that mission.

Lightstep Incident Response manages an organization’s on‑call rotations by synchronizing everyone’s schedule onto a shared calendar, with specific tags that indicate who needs to be looped in based on the nature of the incident and the service that is impacted. From there, collaborators are invited to a dedicated channel based on prebuilt collaboration integrations for quick remediation. Additionally, they can create automations that self‑triage and self‑remediate problems should they reoccur.

Lightstep Incident Response seamlessly integrates with leading monitoring, observability and collaboration tools, including LogicMonitor, Postman, Sumo Logic, Zoom, and more, streamlining the incident response process. For ServiceNow customers, Lightstep Incident Response natively integrates with the Now Platform, allowing users to quickly respond to or escalate incidents to the right team all on one platform and connecting incident response to core operations – putting the entire power of their organization behind the end‑customer experience.

“Combining real‑time observability and incident response gives on‑call engineers powerful insight into the changes that matter and the ability to act quickly,” said Ben Sigelman, GM of Lightstep and co‑creator of OpenTelemetry. “With the introduction of Lightstep Incident Response, we are delivering the all‑in‑one solution for developers and SREs to act with the speed and efficiency necessary to maintain exceptional experiences for customers using their applications and services. In combination with OpenTelemetry, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox project founded in part by Lightstep, organizations will now have the data platform, workflows, and an open standards approach necessary to successfully operate highly distributed cloud native services.”

Lightstep Incident Response is offered as free and paid versions and introduces an innovative usage based pricing model based on the number of active services being managed.