LightStep

About LightStep

LightStep, now known as ServiceNow Cloud Observability, operates in the application performance management (APM) and observability market. The company was founded in San Francisco in 2015 by former Google engineers Ben Sigelman, Ben Cronin, and Daniel Spoonhower. The founding team's background at Google involved creating and managing large-scale monitoring systems, including Dapper, a distributed tracing system, and Monarch, a global metrics and monitoring platform. This experience directly informed LightStep's mission to provide clarity and control over complex software systems, particularly those built with microservices architectures.

The company provides a platform that unifies logs, metrics, and traces to offer comprehensive visibility into cloud-native applications. Its core product, 'Change Intelligence,' is designed to help developers and Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) quickly identify the root cause of performance changes or failures in their systems. The platform analyzes performance data from distributed traces to pinpoint bottlenecks and resolve incidents. By collecting and analyzing 100% of telemetry data without sampling, the system can provide detailed snapshots of system behavior at any point in time. This capability is crucial for clients running complex, distributed systems, which include companies like GitHub, Spotify, and Twilio.

LightStep's business model was based on subscriptions, offering different tiers, including a free community plan, a team plan with pricing starting around $2,000 per month, and custom enterprise plans. This structure served a range of customers, from individual developers to large enterprises. After raising a total of $68.5 million in funding over four rounds from investors like Altimeter Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and Sequoia Capital, the company established a significant market presence. This trajectory culminated in its acquisition by ServiceNow in June 2021 for approximately $510 million. Following the acquisition, LightStep was rebranded to ServiceNow Cloud Observability in August 2023, integrating its technology into ServiceNow's broader portfolio of IT workflow solutions to connect observability insights with automated actions.