Get Started

Get started with Lightstep Observability

Get started with Lightstep Observability by sending metric data from AWS, instrumenting your services with OpenTelemetry, and seeing how Change Intelligence uses both to perform root cause analysis.

Improve your incident response flow

Learn how to improve your incident response capabilities using high-cardinality attributes in your instrumentation, creating alerts, and configuring Workflow Links.

AWS/AMI: Install and configure Microsatellites

Lightstep Observability Microsatellites are straightforward to deploy using a Docker image, AWS/AMI, or a Debian package.

About public Microsatellites

Lightstep Observability offers a public shared Microsatellite pool that can help save time during development and testing. Not having to install and maintain an on-premise Microsatellite pool speeds up the initial production of meaningful traces right away.

Change Intelligence

Change Intelligence determines the service that emitted a metric, searches for performance changes on Key Operations from that service at the same time as the deviation, and then uses trace data to determine what caused the change.

Configure the OpenTelemetry Collector to use a web proxy

Learn how to configure your OpenTelemetry Collector to send telemetry data via a web security appliance or proxy.

Create Lightstep Observability users

Lightstep Observability offers role-based access control (RBAC) to features and functionality. You can add users manually or automatically via domain allowing, authorizing any user at the domain access without an explicit invitation.

Create and manage charts

Learn how to create charts for metric and span data.

Create and manage dashboards

Learn how to create dashboards that can display both your metric and span data.

Create projects for your environments

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.

Docker: Install and configure Microsatellites

Lightstep Observability Microsatellites are straightforward to deploy using a Docker image, AWS/AMI, or a Debian package.

Get started with Lightstep Observability

It's easy to get started with Lightstep Observability. Sign up for an account, send your metric data, add OpenTelemetry instrumentation to your services, and see data flow into Lightstep Observability.

Get support from Customer Success

Contact Customer Success for Lightstep Observability.

How Lightstep Observability works

Learn how metrics, tracing, Microsatellites, the SaaS platform, and the web UI work to analyze 100 percent of unsampled transaction data from distributed, deep systems to produce complete end-to-end traces and robust metrics that explain performance behaviors and accelerate root cause analysis.

Install and configure Microsatellites

Lightstep Observability Microsatellites are straightforward to deploy using a Docker image, AWS/AMI, or a Debian package.

Instrument with Istio as your service mesh

Lightstep Observability works with many service meshes, and Lightstep Observability + Istio is an easy way to get quick visibility into service performance and availability from the perspective of the service mesh.

Integrations

Lightstep Observability integrates with leading cloud-native technologies, metrics producers, service meshes for microservices, and enterprise data visualization and collaboration tools. These turnkey integrations make it easy to deploy Lightstep Observability across large-scale production systems so users get the unrivaled performance insights it provides when they need it and as part of their standard, established workflows.

Learn about Microsatellites

Lightstep Observability uses *Microsatellites* to collect 100% of the performance data that your tracing instrumentation generates. Microsatellites collect spans generated by instrumented clients and servers, and then send them to Space Stations that process and temporarily store that data during trace assembly.

Lightstep Observability Glossary

Glossary of terms used in Lightstep Observability.

Manage your developer satellite

When you are in Developer Mode, your Satellite runs on your machine, allowing you to collect and see only data that you create locally. You can start, stop, and configure your Satellite.

Microsatellite configuration parameters

Lightstep Observability Microsatellites are straightforward to deploy using a Docker image, AWS/AMI, or a Debian package.

Monitor and investigate

Lightstep Observability has a number of tools that help you in all your observability flows, whether it's continual monitoring, triaging an incident, root cause analysis, or managing your team's observability practices.

Multi-telemetry dashboards

You can create dashboards with charts of both metric and span data.

Observe mobile device behavior

Learn how Lightstep Observability handles mobile devices

Query your data

Learn how to query your metric and span data in Lightstep Observability using the Unified Query Builder.

Quick Start for Java, Node.js, Python, and Go

Learn how to instrument your application using OpenTelemetry and then send data to Lightstep Observability.

Quick Start: Tracing instrumentation

Learn how to instrument your app for distributed tracing using OpenTelemetry and Lightstep Observability.

Send span data to Lightstep

Learn how to instrument your application using OpenTelemetry and then send data to Lightstep Observability.

Send telemetry data via OTLP/HTTP

Learn how to configure your instrumentation or OpenTelemetry Collector to send telemetry data to Lightstep's OTLP/HTTP endpoints.

Test connectivity to Microsatellites

Learn how to verify basic HTTP and gRPC connectivity to Lightstep Microsatellites.

Troubleshoot Developer Mode

Troubleshoot your Developer Mode Satellite in Lightstep Observability.

Troubleshooting Missing Data in Lightstep

Data can appear incomplete or not appear in Lightstep for several reasons. Here are some troubleshooting steps for the most common causes.

Understand data retention in Lightstep

Learn how your metric and span data is retained in Lightstep and the data retention period for each.

Understand distributed tracing

Distributed tracing provides a view of the life of a request as it travels across multiple hosts and services communicating over various protocols. With distributed tracing implemented, you have a window into performance at every step in the request.

Use Developer Mode

Developer Mode allows you to run a Satellite locally to view traces generated from your instrumented code as you write it. Reliable feedback helps build confidence that your code is correct, by quickly verifying your instrumentation using a console-like output.

Use Zipkin with Lightstep Observability

If you're currently using Zipkin for tracing, you can configure it to send that data directly to Lightstep Observability Microsatellites with little change. This is a great way to reuse your existing instrumentation architecture either directly in production or to quickly try out Lightstep Observability for the first time.

Use notebooks in your investigation

You can create notebooks for ad-hoc queries, post-mortems, runbooks, collaboration, or anytime you want to keep a record of an investigation.

Verify and test Microsatellite setup

Lightstep Observability Microsatellites are straightforward to deploy using a Docker image, AWS/AMI, or a Debian package.

What is observability?

Learn what observability is and how the Lightstep Observability platform gives you deep visibility into your distributed system, pinpointing areas of regression and change.

Lightstep Observability's Service diagrams – How to quickly investigate critical issues and service dependencies

See what you can do with Lightstep Observability!

Workflow Links – An easier way to manage distributed systems