Founded by Ex-Googlers, LightStep Emerges from Stealth and Redefines Application Performance Management (APM) for Enterprises Adopting Microservices

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Nov 14, 2017) - Today at Structure 2017, LightStep comes out of stealth and formally introduces its first product, LightStep [x]PM. LightStep [x]PM is the first performance management solution to apply APM's core value proposition -- monitoring and troubleshooting performance issues -- across all components of today's software applications: web and mobile clients, monoliths, microservices, both on premises and in the cloud. LightStep gives an accurate, detailed snapshot across the entire complex software system at any given point in time, enabling organizations to identify bottlenecks and resolve incidents rapidly.

Today LightStep also announced $29 million in funding from Sequoia, Redpoint and others: http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=1325065

LightStep was founded in 2015 to address challenges faced by enterprises building complex software. Introducing microservices has accelerated software development, but these additional services bring greater operational complexity and a dramatic increase in the volume of diagnostic data, making performance management a challenge. The existing APM solutions fail to scale or to provide accurate insights in real-time since ordinary transactions can involve dozens to thousands of distinct services.

LightStep [x]PM addresses these challenges with a unique, decentralized architecture that continuously analyzes 100% of transactions across all services, in production. This lets customers measure performance wherever it impacts their business: distinct microservices, key mobile transitions, crucial customer accounts, or individual end-users. When LightStep [x]PM's statistical engine detects an anomaly, it replays and records a detailed end-to-end trace. This trace provides the cross-service context needed to resolve an incident or identify a performance problem.

Customers on LightStep [x]PM
LightStep [x]PM customers take seconds or minutes to resolve incidents that previously required days of ongoing, multi-team firefighting. The product has led to massive performance improvements in key end-user experiences for both web and mobile.

• Twilio reduced incident resolution times by 92% with LightStep. Twilio SVP Platform Jason Hudak said: "LightStep [x]PM not only finds our performance problems, it tells us why they're happening. Within an hour of running LightStep, our billing transactions team was able to identify issues and deliver betterments that led to a 70% reduction in latency. LightStep helps me sleep better at night knowing that our engineers will able to identify and remediate issues in real-time, maintaining customers' trust in Twilio."
• Yext uses LightStep to monitor top customers to provide a best-in-class experience. Yext VP of Engineering Rob Figueiredo said: "With LightStep, we have performance omniscience. It delivers stats and detailed traces, all broken down per customer, in real time. It ensures we deliver on our promises to customers."
• Lyft moved from monoliths to a distributed architecture with LightStep. Lyft VP of Engineering Pete Morelli said: "LightStep is the future of monitoring and was instrumental in our move to microservices. Our systems generate more than 100 billion microservice calls per day. LightStep is one of the only systems that can make sense of that firehose: it jumps to the root cause of performance problems anywhere from mobile all the way to the bottom of our distributed stack."

LightStep Data Sources
There are many ways to integrate with LightStep [x]PM, and customers combine them to gain full coverage of their software systems:

• Native integration with OpenTracing, a CNCF member project and open API standard co-created by Ben Sigelman, CEO and co-founder of LightStep, and others in the OSS tracing community
• Existing centralized logging data from many sources
• Service mesh technologies and load-balancers like Envoy, linkerd, nginx, haproxy and others

"Today's production applications do not come from a single mold," said Daniel Conde, Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "There will be microservices as well as monolithic applications, and deployments will be on bare metal services and on hybrid cloud platforms. These need to co-exist and integrate with each other, so a modern application performance monitoring solution needs to gather data from across the enterprise with all of these models. LightStep [x]PM meets those needs with a modern solution that examines application performance end-to-end, across all of these diagnostic data sources and ultimately enables rapid problem resolution."

"I have seen software development change rapidly in the last decade, and I believe we are entering a new era," said Ben Sigelman, co-founder and CEO at LightStep. "Today, enterprise IT and engineering leaders preside over complex, business-critical software applications that operate at a daunting scale. We built LightStep to deliver products, beginning with LightStep [x]PM, that cut through the complexity of today's production software and keep our customers in control."

Sigelman is an expert in performance analysis and debugging in large software systems. He designed and deployed global-scale monitoring technologies at Google, including Dapper, an always-on distributed tracing system which analyzes more than 2 billion transactions per second.

Additional Resources

• To see customer case studies, go to: http://lightstep.com/customers
• For information on Ben Sigelman's launch presentation on the main stage at Structure, go to: http://www.structureconf.com
• For information on Ben Sigelman's keynote at KubeCon, go to: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/kubecon-and-cloudnativecon-north-america 

About LightStep
LightStep's mission is to cut through the scale and complexity of today's software to help organizations stay in control of their systems. Its first product, LightStep [x]PM, provides an accurate, detailed snapshot of the entire software system at any point in time, enabling organizations to identify bottlenecks and resolve incidents rapidly. LightStep is backed by Redpoint and Sequoia and is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. For more information, visit http://lightstep.com or follow at @LightStepHQ.