Snapshots are not only useful for comparisons of performance over time. You can use them anytime you want to analyze span data in your CI/CD flow. In this step, you’ll use it to find violations of best practices in committed code.

To do this, you create an entry in the lightstep.yml configuration file to name and describe the violations you want to catch. If the action finds any violations, they are reported, they appear in the summary for the service. Violations report

Each violation configuration includes the following:

  • services: The name of the service to check
  • violations: A description of the violation to check for
    • name: A human-readable name for the violation
    • type: Can be either:
      • span.attributes: Looks for an existing attribute on a span
      • connection: Looks for downstream dependencies between services
    • (optional) op: If needed, an operand used to evaluate the type’s value
    • value: The value for the type

Here’s a configured lightstep.yml file set to see if code in a commit:

  • Makes un-allowed requests to downstream services
  • Results in 500 error codes
  • Uses an un-allowed AWS region
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organization: LightStep
project: demo

services:
  web:
	violations:
  	- name: No requests to currency service
    	  type: connection
    	  value: krackend-api-gateway
  	- name: No 500s Allowed
    	  type: span.attributes
    	  key: http.status_code
    	  op: equals
    	  value: 500
  	- name: No us-east-2
    	  type: span.attributes
    	  key: cloud.region
    	  op: equals
    	  value: us-east-2

In the next step, you’ll learn how to integrate Rollbar to report on error status and PagerDuty to provide on-call details.

What did we learn?

  • You can use the Services Change Report in any part of your CI/CD workflow where you need to analyze span data.
  • You can use the lightstep.yml file to configure violations of best practices, and if any are found they are added to the Services Change Report.