SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — LightStep, the leading provider of application performance management for organizations adopting microservices, today announced that it has been recognized in the “Cool Vendors in Performance Analysis; Analytics and Containers”[1] report by Gartner, Inc. In addition, last week LightStep was named one of the 20 Rising Stars as part of the Forbes 2018 Cloud 100 list, the definitive list of the top 100 private cloud companies in the world.

As Gartner stated in the report, “Performance analysis vendors are responding to changing IT environments by incorporating analytics essential for monitoring new paradigms. This research examines vendors with innovative approaches that I&O leaders can use to address challenges presented by containerization, cloud and microservices.”

LightStep formally launched last year to address challenges faced by enterprises building and operating complex software at scale. The growing adoption of microservices has accelerated software development but brings greater operational complexity and a dramatic increase in the volume of diagnostic data, making performance management a challenge. The existing application performance management (APM) solutions designed for monolithic applications fail to handle the scale or complexity of modern architectures. They cannot provide accurate insights in real-time since ordinary transactions involve dozens to thousands of distinct services.

LightStep [x]PM delivers precise and robust measurements of performance issues, in real-time, and provides clear explanations that enable engineers to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR). Its unique, decentralized architecture continuously analyzes 100% of transactions across all services, at scale, in production. [x]PM goes beyond isolated single-transaction timing diagrams to offer differentiated and valuable tracing-based capabilities: LightStep [x]PM uses the raw, unsampled tracing data to power features like real-time monitoring, alerting, timeseries dashboards, and fine-grained multi-dimensional latency analysis.

Customers see reduced MTTR, improved development efficiency and more effective root cause analysis. Twilio was able to reduce MTTR by 92% and achieved a 70% reduction in latency. DigitalOcean saved 1,000 developer hours per month, and Lyft analyzes more than 100 billion microservices calls a day using LightStep [x]PM. Additional customers include Indeed, Yext, GitHub, Airtable, Grab, InVision, Ola, Medium, Segment, Sift Science, BigCommerce, Under Armour, Zalando and many others.

“We’re honored to be named a Gartner Cool Vendor which we believe is due to our unique approach to application performance management for companies adopting microservices. As we talk with engineering organizations using microservices at scale it validates our hypothesis that the thick and heavyweight agents of traditional APM no longer make sense. Pricing should be based on value – such as the scope of analytics – rather than host counts or data volume which both explode in microservices architectures. Further, today’s APM solutions must derive higher-level insights from distributed tracing data, and instrumentation should be based on open standards like OpenTracing,” said Ben Sigelman, co-founder and CEO at LightStep.

Sigelman is an expert in performance analysis and debugging in large software systems. He designed and deployed global-scale monitoring technologies at Google, including Dapper, an always-on distributed tracing system that analyzes more than 2 billion transactions per second. He is also the co-creator of the OpenTracing standard, part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

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About LightStep
LightStep’s mission is to deliver insights that put organizations back in control of their complex software applications. Its first product, LightStep [x]PM, is reinventing application performance management. It provides an accurate, detailed snapshot of the entire software system at any point in time, enabling organizations to identify bottlenecks and resolve incidents rapidly. LightStep is backed by Redpoint and Sequoia and is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. For more information, visit https://lightstep.com or follow at @LightStepHQ.

[1]Gartner “Cool Vendors in Performance Analysis; Analytics and Containers” report by Padraig Byrne, Vivek Bhalla, Pankaj Prasad, Federico De Silva and Charley Rich, 12 September 2018

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