ServiceNow (Lightstep) / lightstep.com
AI-powered distributed tracing and observability platform providing AI root cause analysis, change intelligence, and latency investigation for microservices and cloud-native applications.
Pricing
Free
Free plan
No
Category
Developer Tools
Platforms
2
Free plan
No
API access
No
Open source
No
Platforms
2
Lightstep is a distributed tracing and observability platform acquired by ServiceNow — providing AI-powered root cause analysis, change intelligence, and latency investigation for engineering teams managing microservices and cloud-native applications. ServiceNow acquired Lightstep in 2021 to enhance its IT management capabilities with developer observability. AI capabilities include Change Intelligence — automatically correlating application performance changes to recent code deployments, configuration changes, and infrastructure modifications to identify the root cause of performance degradation. Distributed Tracing provides OpenTelemetry-native tracing — tracking requests across microservices, databases, and external APIs with full trace context propagation. Latency Investigation analyses performance percentile distributions — identifying which backend services, operations, and trace attributes are responsible for tail latency (p99, p999) degradation. Regression Detection automatically identifies when operation latency or error rates degrade from baseline — alerting engineers to regressions without manually configuring per-operation thresholds. Streams provide real-time metric computation from trace data — calculating aggregate metrics from distributed traces rather than requiring separate metric instrumentation. ServiceNow integration connects observability to ITSM — linking Lightstep alerts to ServiceNow incidents for automated incident management. With cloud-native engineering team adoption, Lightstep validates for development teams wanting OpenTelemetry-native distributed tracing.
Lightstep AI runs as ml platform software built around data and code workflows. Users typically start with a prompt, upload, or connected data source, and the underlying model handles the heavy lifting before returning a result you can refine or export. It's available on web and api.
The capabilities that matter most for teams evaluating Lightstep AI.
Deployment correlation to performance degradation — faster root cause for release-induced issues.
p99 and p999 degradation analysis identifying slow operation root causes.
Standards-based instrumentation without vendor lock-in.
Enterprise licensing. No public pricing. Acquired by ServiceNow. Demo available.
Model
Enterprise
Starting price
Free
Free trial
Yes
Datadog (covered) provides widely deployed APM. Dynatrace (covered) provides AI APM. Instana (rank 987) provides cloud-native APM. Honeycomb (covered) provides observability for complex systems.
A side-by-side look at the closest alternative in this category.
Key facts about model providers, platforms, and team support.
Model Provider
ServiceNow AI
Platforms
Web, API
Deployment
SaaS
Integrations
Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, GCP, ServiceNow, API
Team Collaboration
No
Launch Year
2022
Compliance signals and data-handling notes as reported by the vendor.
SOC 2 Type II. ISO 27001. GDPR compliant. Enterprise data handling agreements.
Application trace and metric data processed on Lightstep cloud. Change Intelligence analyses deployment metadata alongside performance data.
Verified reviews from signed-in users, stored in the backend and averaged into this tool's rating.
Editorial Verdict
Lightstep is a solid AI distributed tracing platform for cloud-native teams wanting change intelligence, OpenTelemetry-native tracing, tail latency investigation, and ServiceNow integration.
Last verified July 24, 2026.
Enterprise licensing. No public pricing. Acquired by ServiceNow. Demo available.
Annual subscription. Custom pricing. Owned by IBM. Demo available.
SOC 2 Type II. ISO 27001. GDPR compliant. Enterprise data handling agreements.
SOC 2 Type II. ISO 27001. GDPR compliant. FedRAMP eligible. Enterprise data handling agreements.
Application trace and metric data processed on Lightstep cloud. Change Intelligence analyses deployment metadata alongside performance data.
Application performance and trace data processed on IBM Instana cloud or customer on-premise. AI anomaly detection analyses metric streams from Instana agents.
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