Root Cause Analysis

Create and manage Workflow Links

Create, edit, clone, and delete Workflow Links.

Create deployment markers

You can add deployment markers to your charts to see when service versions change, and if the change affects performance in any way.

Create links to important information

Lightstep Observability lets you add flexible Workflow Links on the Trace View page that link to other resources, allowing access to all the info you need when you need it.

Find correlated areas of latency and errors

A standard method of identifying the root cause of a performance regression is to manually comb through traces and search for common system attributes associated with that regression or with errors. With Correlations, Lightstep Observability helps you find attributes correlated with latency and errors automatically.

Investigate a deviation

Use Lightstep Observability's Change Intelligence when you notice a deviation in your charts to quickly find the root cause.

Investigate a latency regression

You can use Lightstep Observability not only to monitor your services after a deploy, but also to compare performance over specific time periods and then dig into details to find the differences that caused the issue.

Investigate an error rate increase

When you notice an increase in error rate on Lightstep Observability's Service Health view, you can use the analytical tools to find the source of errors.

Post previews to Slack

When you integrate Lightstep Observability with Slack, you can copy a link to a specific Explorer query or Trace View page, post it into any Slack channel in your workspace, and all the pertinent info from that page displays in the Slack channel.

Query real-time span data

Lightstep Observability's Explorer view allows you to query all span data currently in the Microsatellites' retention window to see what's going on. You create Snapshots that are durably persisted, allowing you to view performance at a certain point in time and share that Snapshot with others. You can see real-time span data, filter and group that data, and drill down on common attributes that may be causing latency.

Query your data

Learn how to query your metric and span data in Lightstep Observability using either the Unified Query Builder or using the editor with UQL.

Register a service name attribute for metrics

You register an attribute on your metric data that holds the service's name and allows Change Intelligence to correlate metric and trace data.

Share your findings

You can share the URL from the different views in Lightstep Observability (Change Intelligence, Trace, Explorer, etc.), and users will be taken into Lightstep Observability to that view. If you integrate with Slack, you can post a URL for an Explorer query or a Trace view in Slack and members can see a preview of that data directly in the channel.

Troubleshoot Change Intelligence

Lightstep Observability's Change Intelligence correlates changes found in traces with deviations in your metric data. But there may be times when you need help getting that correlation to work as expected. Here are some issues you may run into and how to solve them.

Use dependency maps

You can add dependency maps to your dashboards and notebooks that allow you to view services and operations in context of each other, both up and downstream.

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.

Use scatter plots

Add scatter plots to dashboards and notebooks, visualizing spans and the traces they come from.

Use the Unified Query Builder

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

Use variables in Workflow Links

Use variables to render Workflow Link names, URLs, and rules.

View and compare deployed versions

Lightstep Observability offers a way to see how your deployments (even partial deployments) affect your service performance.

View service health

Lightstep Observability offers a way to quickly see how all your services and their operations are performing in one place - the Service Directory view.

View service hierarchy and performance

You can use Lightstep Observability's Service diagram to get an aggregate view of trace data as a request travels through your system. The Service diagram provides a visual, interactive, and hierarchical representation of a system’s behavior for a given point in time.

View traces

You use the Trace view to see a full trace from beginning to end of a request. The Trace view shows you a flame graph of the full trace (each service a different color) and below that, each span is shown in a hierarchy, allowing you to see the parent-child relationship of all the spans in the trace. Errors are shown in red.

Visualize your data

You use charts in your dashboards, notebooks, and alerts to visualize your data.

Workflow Links cookbook

Templates and examples for popular Workflow Links in Lightstep Observability.

How to resolve a regression with Lightstep Observability

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

Rapid incident investigation with Lightstep Observability

See what you can do with Lightstep Observability!

Workflow Links – An easier way to manage distributed systems