Lightstep from ServiceNow Delivers Fully Observable Kubernetes Applications With New Unified Query Language

Businesses will be able to use observability-as-code to manage Kubernetes applications at scale, allowing for deeper consistency, maintainability, and reproducibility across cloud-native architectures

ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW), the leading digital workflow company making the world work better for everyone, today announced the general availability of Lightstep UQL (Unified Query Language) which will help companies extend visibility across Kubernetes applications. Using shift-left observability directly in code, DevOps teams help ensure Kubernetes applications are ‘born’ fully observable and proactively enforce consistency, maintainability, and reproducibility best practices – as opposed to having SREs build dashboards on the fly.

With IDC forecasting the growth of the observability market to reach $9.08 billion by 2025,¹ finding and extracting the right data becomes even more complex at scale, as existing multi-cloud observability solutions tend to produce fragmented experiences that create more work in the long run for DevOps and SRE teams. With Lightstep UQL, teams can have an easier time migrating their observability from other scattered tools onto a unified Lightstep platform through a single query language, making it possible to query and correlate metrics, logs, and traces on demand across thousands of Kubernetes nodes, servers, or serverless functions.

“Engineers today can leverage observability-as-code for more powerful and flexible insights into the health and performance of their cloud-native applications,” said Ben Sigelman, general manager and co-founder of Lightstep from ServiceNow. “This is especially important when thinking about modern architectures like Kubernetes, which are highly complex and dynamic. Lightstep UQL works to ensure that every Kubernetes application deployed is fully instrumented and observable by default.”

“Because of current limitations within observability tools, many enterprises still observe applications at the application level instead of the infrastructure/microservice level. By instrumenting Kubernetes clusters, distributed applications can have observability baked in from inception instead of being an afterthought,” said Andy Thurai, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research. He also said, “Offering observability-as-code can help developers adhere to fully observable standards from the design level, which reduces friction between DevOps and SRE/Ops teams.”

ServiceNow acquired Lightstep, a next generation application monitoring and observability platform, in 2021 to extend the benefits of observability across the enterprise through digital workflows. Earlier this month, ServiceNow announced an agreement to acquire Era Software, an observability and log management innovator, which will complement and augment existing features within Lightstep. Today’s announcement is another step to accelerate ServiceNow’s path toward unified telemetry (logs, metrics, traces).

For more information on Lightstep UQL, visit the Lightstep blog.

About ServiceNow

ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) is making the world of work, work better for people. Our cloud‑based platform and solutions deliver digital workflows that create great experiences and unlock productivity for employees and the enterprise. For more information, visit: www.servicenow.com.

© 2022 ServiceNow, Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

¹ IDC TechBrief: IT Observability for Digital Infrastructure Operations, July 2022, Doc #US49358522

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