You can have several projects in Lightstep Observability. For example, you might have one project for your development environment and one for production. Or you may have projects for different areas of your application while they’re in development.

Many things in Lightstep Observability are project-specific, meaning they apply only to the project and won’t be applicable to everything in an Enterprise’s account. The following are specific to projects:

  • Access Tokens: Tracers use access tokens to send data to your Microsatellites.
  • Workflow links: Workflow links allow you to add links to the Trace view to information you may need while resolving an incident.
  • Deployment Markers: When you use an instrumentation attribute to denote deployments to an environment, Lightstep Observability allows you to see how your deployments may have affected performance in your system.

  • Metric details: You can view all metrics reporting to this project. Click on a metric to add or edit its details.

    When you add or change a metric’s details, you can choose to apply those changes to all projects.

  • Service name attribute for metric data: Lightstep Observability’s Change Intelligence uses a service name tag in your metric data to map that data to your trace data and find components in your system whose performance changed at the same time as a metric change.
  • Instrumentation Quality Score: Lightstep Observability analyzes the instrumentation on your services and provides a score to let you know where your instrumentation might need improvement. The better your instrumentation, the better Lightstep Observability can help you find and mitigate issues. To ensure that all your services use the specific attributes needed by your system, you can register custom and environment attributes with Lightstep Observability. If these are missing from a service, Lightstep Observability will report it and provide the code needed to add it to your service.
  • Inferred Services: When you use attributes to mark requests going to external services (like a database), Lightstep Observability can report on performance of those services.

  • Microsatellites: Microsatellites collect the span data sent from your tracers. You can enforce a project to only accept data from your on-premise Microsatellites. This can be helpful for projects that are for a production environment.

    Lightstep recommends having a separate project for each environment (for example, prod and dev), and then using single-project mode on your Microsatellites to create a dedicated pool for each project. Doing so also avoids having to send access tokens from your tracers.

  • Data retention policy: Determine how long your span data lives in Lightstep Observability. By default, data is saved for 28 days. Depending on your Lightstep Observability plan, you can increase that time to match your company’s data retention policy, up to 2 years.

Access a project

To load the data and settings for a project, click Projects in the navigation bar and select your project.

Create a project

You create projects on the Projects and users page.

This image shows how to create a project. The steps below describe the procedure in more detail.

Create a project

  1. In Lightstep Observability’s navigation bar, click Account management > Projects and users.
  2. Click New project.
  3. In the dialog, enter a name for the project and click Confirm to create your project. Your project is now in Lightstep Observability’s project list.

Adjust project settings

Manage a project’s settings in Project settings. The Project settings page lets you manage Access tokens, Workflow links, metric details, and more.

Follow these steps to access Project settings:

  1. In Lightstep Observability’s navigation bar, click Projects and select your project.
  2. In the same sidebar, click Project settings. Access project settings

Delete a project

You delete a project on the Projects and users page.

This image shows how to delete a project. The steps below describe the procedure in more detail.

Delete a project

  1. In Lightstep Observability’s navigation bar, click Account management > Projects and users.
  2. Under Projects, find your project and click Delete.
  3. In the dialog, enter your project name and click Delete <project name> from <organization name>.