Instrumentation

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.NET Auto-Instrumentation

If your app is written in .NET, you can get started quickly with Lightstep. Download the Auto-Installer, then configure it to communicate with your Lightstep Satellites. When you deploy your app, all supported libraries will begin sending trace data to Lightstep.

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Add Metadata to Your Spans

When you add metadata to your span's telemetry data, it will enable more segmentation, making it easier to find, filter, and group your span data in Lightstep.

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Add infrastructure Metrics to Your Instrumentation

Lightstep can ingest infrastructure metrics from your instrumentation to report on things like CPU and memory usage to help you resolve incidents fater.

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Already Instrumented?

If you've already instrumented your system, but were using another tracing library, no worries! Lightstep can ingest that instrumentation with almost no additional code needed.

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Already Using OpenTelemetry Collectors?

If you've already instrumented with OpenTelemetry using Collectors, then getting data into Lightstep requires only an edit to the configuration file.

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C#/.NET Manual Instrumentation with OpenTracing

Configure your tracer to communicate with the Lightstep Satellites and create a single span on your C# service. You install both the OpenTracing API and Lightstep tracer and then use the OpenTracing and Lightstep APIs to instrument your code.

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C++ Manual Instrumentation for OpenTracing

This Quick Start will have you configure your tracer to communicate with the Lightstep Satellites and create a single span on your C++ service. You install both the OpenTracing API and Lightstep tracer and then use the OpenTracing and Lightstep APIs to instrument your code.

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Coding For Observability

Best practices in distributed tracing for documenting the system behaviors that are expected to change along with a particular code change.

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Create and Manage Access Tokens

Lightstep use access tokens to identify the project the tracer is reporting for. Lightstep Satellites need this token to accept and store span data from the tracer.

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Dimensionality in Observability

A key part of an organization's observability strategy is creating and maintaining the ability to think about and compare applications “horizontally”. When telemetry for observability is unique to each application or framework it causes new organizational issues.

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Golang Manual Instrumentation with OpenTracing

Configure your tracer to communicate with the Lightstep Satellites and create a single span on your Go service. You install both the OpenTracing API and Lightstep tracer and then use the OpenTracing and Lightstep APIs to instrument your code.

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Instrument Your App

Use OpenTelemetry to instrument your services and have the resulting data sent to Lightstep.

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Instrument with Istio as Your Service Mesh

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

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Instrumentation Best Practices

Observability gives you the necessary information about the health and efficiency of your system. However, systems are large and complex, so the question is what do you decide to measure and where do you start?

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Java Auto-Instrumentation

If your app is written in Java, you can get started quickly with Lightstep. Download the Java SpecialAgent, then configure it to communicate with your Lightstep Satellites. When you deploy your app, all supported third-party framework libraries (like the Elasticsearch client, RxJava, or the Kafka client) will begin sending trace data to Lightstep.

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Java Manual Instrumentation with OpenTracing

Configure your tracer to communicate with the Lightstep Satellites and create a single span on your Java service. You install both the OpenTracing API and Lightstep tracer and then use the OpenTracing and Lightstep APIs to instrument your code.

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JavaScript Manual Instrumentation with OpenTracing

Configure your tracer to communicate with the Lightstep Satellites and create a single span on your JavaScript service. You install both the OpenTracing API and Lightstep tracer and then use the OpenTracing and Lightstep APIs to instrument your code.

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Lightstep Integrations

Lightstep integrates with leading cloud-native technologies, service meshes for microservices, and enterprise data visualization and collaboration tools. These turnkey integrations make it easy to deploy Lightstep 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.

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Load Balance Lightstep

Having effective load balancing of your Lightstep Satellites is important to ensure a consistent and adjustable recall window for the Satellite pool and allow for efficient use of Satellite computing resources.

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Manage Email Notifications

Lightstep automatically determines how well your services are instrumented and performing, and sends email notifications that let you know how you're doing.

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Measure Your Instrumentation Quality

The span data that you view and use in Lightstep for observability into your system depends on the quality of your tracing instrumentation. The better and more comprehensive your instrumentation is, the better Lightstep can collect and analyze your data to provide highly actionable information. Lightstep analyzes the instrumentation on your services and determines how you can improve it to make Lightstep work even better for you.

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Migrate to OpenTelemetry

Use OpenTelemetry bridges to easily move from OpenTracing to OpenTelemetry

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Monitor Lightstep Performance

Lightstep performance is based on the ingress and egress of data from the tracers to the Satellites, the amount of memory the Satellites have to store that data, and the length of the recall window. You can monitor the performance of Lightstep and tune Satellites to avoid dropped spans.

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Monitor Satellites, Traces, and Service Reporting

The Reporting Status page provides an active view of the Lightstep Tracer clients and Satellites over a trailing 60-second window.

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Node.js Auto-Instrumentation

If your app is written in Node.js, you can get started quickly with Lightstep. Download the Auto-Installer, then configure it to communicate with your Lightstep Satellites. When you deploy your app, all supported libraries will begin sending trace data to Lightstep.

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Objective-C and Swift Manual Instrumentation

Configure your tracer to communicate with the Lightstep Satellites and create a single span on your Objective-C/Swift service. You install both the Lightstep tracer and then use the Lightstep API to instrument your code.

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Observe Mobile Device Behavior

Learn how Lightstep handles mobile devices

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PHP Manual Instrumentation for OpenTracing

Configure your tracer to communicate with the Lightstep Satellites and create a single span on your PHP service. You install the Lightstep tracer and then use the Lightstep API to instrument your code.

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Performance Is A Shape. Cost Is A Number: Sampling

Learn how distributed tracing sampling impacts the ability to analyze observability data, using key=value restrictions for some keys and grouping the output based on other keys.

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Python Auto-Instrumentation

If your app is written in Python, you can get started quickly with Lightstep. Download the Auto-Installer, then configure it to communicate with your Lightstep Satellites. When you deploy your app, all supported frameworks, data stores, and libraries will begin sending trace data to Lightstep.

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Python Manual Instrumentation with OpenTracing

Configure your tracer to communicate with the Lightstep Satellites and create a single span on your Python service. You install both the OpenTracing API and Lightstep tracer and then use the OpenTracing and Lightstep APIs to instrument your code.

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

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

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

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

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Quick Start: Instrumentation

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

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Ruby Add Spans

Manually add spans to your Ruby service.

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Ruby Auto-Instrumentation

If your app is written in Ruby, you can get started quickly with Lightstep. Download the Auto-Installer, then configure it to communicate with your Lightstep Satellites. When you deploy your app, all supported libraries will begin sending trace data to Lightstep.

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Ruby Instrumentation Using OpenTracing

Use Ruby to instrument your app for distributed tracing using OpenTracing.

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Ruby Manual Instrumentation with OpenTracing

Configure your tracer to communicate with the Lightstep Satellites and create a single span on your Ruby service. You install both the OpenTracing API and Lightstep tracer and then use the OpenTracing and Lightstep APIs to instrument your code.

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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.

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Use Jaeger Agent with Lightstep

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

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Use OpenTracing for Instrumentation

Learn about OpenTracing and how to instrument your app for distributed tracing and observability.

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Use Tags and Logs to Find Issues Fast

A span can have zero or more key/value *tags*. Tags allow you to create metadata about the span.

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Use Zipkin with Lightstep

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