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.
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
Alternatives
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Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-01.