LightStep Illuminates the Case for Monitoring Distributed Applications

With the adoption of microservice architectures, enterprises can find themselves struggling to monitor their applications. On today’s episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, LightStep co-founder and OpenTracing co-author Ben Sigelman sat down with TNS founder Alex Williams during KubeCon 2016 to discuss the open source OpenTracing monitoring tool and its origins in Google Dappler.

Having been a part of Google from 2003-2012, Sigelman worked on Google’s distributed tracing infrastructure Dappler before moving on to OpenTracing and its support company LightStep. While Dappler is often hailed by the community as inspiration for many distributed system open source tracing tools, Sigelman noted that, “One of the things that is troublesome for me about most tracing systems is they cite Dappler. Dappler was not the right thing for the rest of the world, it was debatably not the right thing for Google,” noted Sigelman.

Sponsor Note

The Cloud Foundry Foundation is an independent non-profit organization formed to sustain the development, promotion and adoption of Cloud Foundry as the industry standard platform for cloud applications. Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications.

Allowing large enterprises to adopt open tracing at scale without forcing vendor lock-in and offering transparency in choice is something Sigelman focuses on at LightStep, with LightStep’s commercial OpenTracing-based package aiming for a GA release in 2017. “As OpenTracing gets pushed upmarket, I think there’s a lot of desire to have the standardization of wire formats,” said Sigelman, adding, “With OpenTracing, you have data flowing through an application and being used to tie key value information from the top of the stack to semantics at the bottom of the stack. That’s a shift I think we’re going to see more of as people move to more shared infrastructures.”

December 12, 2016 // New York City @ Conrad New York

December 12, 2016 // New York City @ Conrad New York

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