Lightstep (ServiceNow Cloud Observability)
Distributed tracing and observability platform (now part of ServiceNow as Cloud Observability) that analyzes OpenTelemetry traces at scale, with APIs for querying telemetry data and managing observability configuration.
Score Breakdown
⚙ Agent Friendliness
🔒 Security
Observability/APM platform (now ServiceNow Cloud Observability). API key auth. Trace data may contain sensitive request payloads. RBAC for data access.
⚡ Reliability
Best When
You're using OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing in microservices and want deep trace analytics with Change Intelligence to correlate deployments with performance.
Avoid When
You don't have distributed services generating trace data, or you're already committed to Honeycomb or Datadog APM.
Use Cases
- • Querying trace data to identify performance regressions in distributed services
- • Programmatically managing alert conditions and SLO configurations
- • Integrating trace analysis into CI/CD pipelines for performance regression detection
- • Correlating deploy events with performance changes via the Change Intelligence API
- • Building custom observability dashboards from trace and metric data
Not For
- • Infrastructure-level metrics monitoring (use Prometheus or Datadog for host metrics)
- • Log aggregation as primary use case
- • Organizations not already using OpenTelemetry or distributed tracing
- • Small teams without distributed service architectures
Interface
Authentication
API keys are project-scoped. Created in the Lightstep console. No fine-grained scope control per key.
Pricing
No public pricing or self-service trial. Enterprise contract required. Pricing based on spans ingested per month.
Agent Metadata
Known Gotchas
- ⚠ Product has been rebranded to ServiceNow Cloud Observability — documentation may reference both names inconsistently
- ⚠ Project and organization IDs are distinct concepts — both required for most API calls
- ⚠ Span data is sampled — query results represent sampled data, not 100% of spans
- ⚠ API access patterns may evolve post-ServiceNow acquisition — verify API stability before long-term investment
- ⚠ Change Intelligence events require specific ingestion format — review documentation before integration
Alternatives
Full Evaluation Report
Detailed scoring breakdown, competitive positioning, security analysis, and improvement recommendations for Lightstep (ServiceNow Cloud Observability).
Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-06.