VMblog Expert Interview, Ben Sigelman of Lightstep - Observability for Microservices or Serverless

In this episode of the VMblog Expert Video Interview Series, we spoke with Ben Sigelman, the CEO and co-founder of Lightstep, creators of one of the leading Observability tools for understanding microservices and serverless architectures.

Quick background. Lightstep delivers confidence at scale for those who develop, operate and rely on today’s powerful software applications. Its products leverage distributed tracing technology – initially developed by a Lightstep co-founder at Google – to offer best-of-breed observability to organizations adopting microservices or serverless at scale.

Watch this video interview to learn more as Sigelman explains the differences between monitoring and observability and how these tools breakdown. He also discusses the OpenTelemetry project, and how Lightstep makes use of it rather than proprietary agents to collect data. The company has also been working on something new, Change Intelligence, and Sigelman explains it and what makes it possible. Finally, we wrap up with a discussion around AIOps and how Change Intelligence benefits developers, SREs and other engineers.

Find out more about Lightstep at their website: https://lightstep.com
You can also give it a try in this sandbox environment: https://lightstep.com/sandbox
Or get started with a community account: https://app.lightstep.com/signup/developer

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Jump straight in: ↪️
0:00​ - Intro
0:48​ - Ben Sigelman explains differences between monitoring and observability.
3:09 - Expectation that users will have a tool for monitoring and another for observability
4:33 - Lightstep doesn't use proprietary agents for data collection, but rather OpenTelemetry.
9:04​ - Introducing Change Intelligence. What is it and what makes it possible?
11:53 - Is this different from AIOps?
14:48​ - Wrap up