ServiceNow Buys DevOps Observability Platform Lightstep

ServiceNow has signed an agreement to acquire next-generation observability leader Lightstep.

With this acquisition, the company said it will accelerate its position as the world’s leading enterprise platform for digital businesses. With Lightstep’s application monitoring and observability capabilities, ServiceNow will help DevOps engineers build, deploy, run and monitor state-of-the-art, cloud-native applications. Together, ServiceNow and Lightstep will extend the benefits of observability across the enterprise through digital workflows that convert real-time insights into action across all the technologies, people, and processes that enable digital business.

“Companies are betting on going digital in order to thrive in the 21st century, but the transition is often challenging to navigate,” said Pablo Stern, SVP & GM, IT Workflow Products, ServiceNow. “With Lightstep, ServiceNow will transform how software solutions are delivered to customers. This will ultimately make it easier for customers to innovate quickly. Now they’ll be able to build and operate their software faster than ever before and take the new era of work head on with confidence.”

The combination of ServiceNow and Lightstep will deliver deep operational insights so enterprises can more effectively use modern technology stacks. Lightstep’s solution analyses system-wide metrics and tracing data in real time to understand the cause and effects of changes to application performance, reliability, and development velocity. The Now Platform coordinates the technical and team response, connecting insights with actions needed to drive digital transformation.  Customers will be able to more easily monitor and respond to critical signals and indicators of software health using Lightstep’s capabilities with ServiceNow’s IT workflow solutions’ ability to weave disparate elements into a seamless digital fabric. This gives business the confidence and clarity to drive faster innovation and better outcomes across the entire digital experience.

Lightstep is the trusted observability solution for both born-in-the-cloud companies like GitHub, Spotify and Twilio and fast-growing enterprises whose businesses are increasingly reliant on software applications.  The Lightstep platform provides a unified approach to observability with system-wide visibility and insights integrated across metrics, distributed traces, and logs. This helps organisations speed software development velocity without compromising quality and to drive faster innovation across the entire digital customer experience.

“Today, observability primarily benefits the DevOps teams that build and operate mission-critical apps,” said Ben Sigelman, CEO and Co-Founder at Lightstep. “We’ve always believed that the value of observability should extend across the entire enterprise, providing greater clarity and confidence to every team involved in these modern, digital businesses. By joining ServiceNow, together we will realise that vision for our customers and help transform the world of work in the process – and we couldn’t be more excited about it.”

San Francisco-based Lightstep was co-founded in 2015 by CEO Ben Sigelman, COO Ben Cronin, and Chief Architect Daniel Spoonhower. Key Lightstep team members helped define modern observability with their prior work on tracing and metrics monitoring at Google. Lightstep team members also co-created both the OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry open-source projects, leading the industry’s overall migration away from proprietary agents towards the portable, always-on, and open standards-based acquisition of traces, metrics, and logs.

ServiceNow expects to complete the acquisition in Q2 2021. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.