Alternatives to LightStep logo

Alternatives to LightStep

Honeycomb, New Relic, Jaeger, Datadog, and Instana are the most popular alternatives and competitors to LightStep.
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What is LightStep and what are its top alternatives?

LightStep is a distributed tracing tool that provides end-to-end visibility into complex systems, allowing users to monitor and analyze performance issues in real-time. Its key features include distributed tracing, root cause analysis, service topology mapping, and real-time alerts. However, LightStep's pricing can be expensive for small to medium-sized businesses, and the learning curve for its advanced features can be steep.1. Jaeger: Jaeger is an open-source, end-to-end distributed tracing tool that helps users monitor and troubleshoot transactions in complex systems. Key features include high scalability, adaptive sampling, and support for multiple languages. Pros: Open-source, easy integration with Kubernetes. Cons: Limited support for advanced telemetry analysis.2. Zipkin: Zipkin is another open-source distributed tracing system that helps users gather timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems. Key features include support for different storage backends, dependency graph visualization, and rich instrumentation. Pros: Open-source, flexible architecture. Cons: Limited scalability for large systems.3. Datadog APM: Datadog's APM tool provides distributed tracing and real-time performance monitoring for applications running in cloud environments. Key features include code-level insights, customizable dashboards, and seamless integration with other Datadog monitoring tools. Pros: Easy to use, rich visualization capabilities. Cons: Higher pricing compared to some alternatives.4. Dynatrace: Dynatrace is an AI-driven monitoring solution that offers distributed tracing, code-level insights, and automated root cause analysis for optimizing application performance. Key features include real-time user monitoring, automatic deployment analysis, and built-in log analytics. Pros: AI-powered insights, comprehensive monitoring capabilities. Cons: Higher cost for additional features.5. Instana: Instana is an application performance management tool that provides real-time monitoring, distributed tracing, and anomaly detection for microservices and cloud-native applications. Key features include automated application mapping, dynamic dependency discovery, and continuous profiler. Pros: Automatic infrastructure monitoring, easy setup. Cons: Limited support for legacy systems.6. OpenTelemetry: OpenTelemetry is a set of APIs, libraries, agents, and instrumentation to provide distributed tracing and telemetry data collection for cloud-native software. Key features include vendor-agnostic observability and seamless integration with various monitoring tools. Pros: Community-driven, flexible instrumentation. Cons: Initial setup and configuration can be complex.7. New Relic: New Relic is a cloud-based observability platform that offers distributed tracing, error monitoring, and performance optimization for modern software environments. Key features include real-time alerts, customizable dashboards, and end-user experience monitoring. Pros: All-in-one observability solution, easy to use. Cons: Pricing can be high for certain features.8. Honeycomb: Honeycomb is an observability platform that provides distributed tracing, debugging, and performance monitoring for modern engineering teams. Key features include high-resolution data sampling, comprehensive event analytics, and collaborative tools for issue resolution. Pros: High-resolution data, collaborative debugging. Cons: Pricing can be complex for larger organizations.9. SignalFx: SignalFx is a cloud monitoring platform that offers distributed tracing, real-time analytics, and visualization for applications built on modern architectures. Key features include predictive analytics, anomaly detection, and integration with popular CI/CD tools. Pros: Real-time alerting, scalable architecture. Cons: Limited support for legacy systems.10. Sysdig: Sysdig provides container monitoring and security solutions, including distributed tracing, troubleshooting, and performance optimization for containerized applications. Key features include deep container visibility, real-time metrics, and automated anomaly detection. Pros: Focus on containerized environments, robust security features. Cons: Less focus on traditional application architectures.

Top Alternatives to LightStep

  • Honeycomb
    Honeycomb

    We built Honeycomb to answer the hard questions that come up when you're trying to operate your software–to debug microservices, serverless, distributed systems, polyglot persistence, containers, and a world of fast, parallel deploys. ...

  • New Relic
    New Relic

    The world’s best software and DevOps teams rely on New Relic to move faster, make better decisions and create best-in-class digital experiences. If you run software, you need to run New Relic. More than 50% of the Fortune 100 do too. ...

  • Jaeger
    Jaeger

    Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing System

  • Datadog
    Datadog

    Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog! ...

  • Instana
    Instana

    It is the Application Performance Management solution for modern dynamic applications, using automation and AI to manage their service quality. ...

  • AppDynamics
    AppDynamics

    AppDynamics develops application performance management (APM) solutions that deliver problem resolution for highly distributed applications through transaction flow monitoring and deep diagnostics. ...

  • SignalFx
    SignalFx

    We provide operational intelligence for today’s elastic architectures through monitoring specifically designed for microservices and containers with: -powerful and proactive alerting -metrics aggregation -visualization into time series data ...

  • Zipkin
    Zipkin

    It helps gather timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems in service architectures. Features include both the collection and lookup of this data. ...

LightStep alternatives & related posts

Honeycomb logo

Honeycomb

75
7
Observability for a distributed world--designed for high cardinality data and collaborative problem solving 🐝💖
75
7
PROS OF HONEYCOMB
  • 2
    Powerful UI
  • 2
    High-Cardinality Data
  • 2
    BubbleUp + Heat maps
  • 1
    Better Value
CONS OF HONEYCOMB
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    related Honeycomb posts

    Robert Zuber

    Our primary source of monitoring and alerting is Datadog. We’ve got prebuilt dashboards for every scenario and integration with PagerDuty to manage routing any alerts. We’ve definitely scaled past the point where managing dashboards is easy, but we haven’t had time to invest in using features like Anomaly Detection. We’ve started using Honeycomb for some targeted debugging of complex production issues and we are liking what we’ve seen. We capture any unhandled exceptions with Rollbar and, if we realize one will keep happening, we quickly convert the metrics to point back to Datadog, to keep Rollbar as clean as possible.

    We use Segment to consolidate all of our trackers, the most important of which goes to Amplitude to analyze user patterns. However, if we need a more consolidated view, we push all of our data to our own data warehouse running PostgreSQL; this is available for analytics and dashboard creation through Looker.

    See more
    New Relic logo

    New Relic

    20.8K
    1.9K
    New Relic is the industry’s largest and most comprehensive cloud-based observability platform.
    20.8K
    1.9K
    PROS OF NEW RELIC
    • 415
      Easy setup
    • 344
      Really powerful
    • 245
      Awesome visualization
    • 194
      Ease of use
    • 151
      Great ui
    • 106
      Free tier
    • 80
      Great tool for insights
    • 66
      Heroku Integration
    • 55
      Market leader
    • 49
      Peace of mind
    • 21
      Push notifications
    • 20
      Email notifications
    • 17
      Heroku Add-on
    • 16
      Error Detection and Alerting
    • 13
      Multiple language support
    • 11
      SQL Analysis
    • 11
      Server Resources Monitoring
    • 9
      Transaction Tracing
    • 8
      Apdex Scores
    • 8
      Azure Add-on
    • 7
      Analysis of CPU, Disk, Memory, and Network
    • 7
      Detailed reports
    • 6
      Performance of External Services
    • 6
      Error Analysis
    • 6
      Application Availability Monitoring and Alerting
    • 6
      Application Response Times
    • 5
      Most Time Consuming Transactions
    • 5
      JVM Performance Analyzer (Java)
    • 4
      Browser Transaction Tracing
    • 4
      Top Database Operations
    • 4
      Easy to use
    • 3
      Application Map
    • 3
      Weekly Performance Email
    • 3
      Pagoda Box integration
    • 3
      Custom Dashboards
    • 2
      Easy to setup
    • 2
      Background Jobs Transaction Analysis
    • 2
      App Speed Index
    • 1
      Super Expensive
    • 1
      Team Collaboration Tools
    • 1
      Metric Data Retention
    • 1
      Metric Data Resolution
    • 1
      Worst Transactions by User Dissatisfaction
    • 1
      Real User Monitoring Overview
    • 1
      Real User Monitoring Analysis and Breakdown
    • 1
      Time Comparisons
    • 1
      Access to Performance Data API
    • 1
      Incident Detection and Alerting
    • 1
      Best of the best, what more can you ask for
    • 1
      Best monitoring on the market
    • 1
      Rails integration
    • 1
      Free
    • 0
      Proce
    • 0
      Price
    • 0
      Exceptions
    • 0
      Cost
    CONS OF NEW RELIC
    • 20
      Pricing model doesn't suit microservices
    • 10
      UI isn't great
    • 7
      Expensive
    • 7
      Visualizations aren't very helpful
    • 5
      Hard to understand why things in your app are breaking

    related New Relic posts

    Farzeem Diamond Jiwani
    Software Engineer at IVP · | 8 upvotes · 1.5M views

    Hey there! We are looking at Datadog, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic as options for our web application monitoring.

    Current Environment: .NET Core Web app hosted on Microsoft IIS

    Future Environment: Web app will be hosted on Microsoft Azure

    Tech Stacks: IIS, RabbitMQ, Redis, Microsoft SQL Server

    Requirement: Infra Monitoring, APM, Real - User Monitoring (User activity monitoring i.e., time spent on a page, most active page, etc.), Service Tracing, Root Cause Analysis, and Centralized Log Management.

    Please advise on the above. Thanks!

    See more
    Shared insights
    on
    New RelicNew RelicKibanaKibana

    I need to choose a monitoring tool for my project, but currently, my application doesn't have much load or many users. My application is not generating GBs of data. We don't want to send the user information to New Relic because it's a 3rd party tool. And we can deploy Kibana locally on our server. What should I use, Kibana or New Relic?

    See more
    Jaeger logo

    Jaeger

    338
    25
    Distributed tracing system released as open source by Uber
    338
    25
    PROS OF JAEGER
    • 7
      Open Source
    • 7
      Easy to install
    • 6
      Feature Rich UI
    • 5
      CNCF Project
    CONS OF JAEGER
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      related Jaeger posts

      Datadog logo

      Datadog

      9.4K
      860
      Unify logs, metrics, and traces from across your distributed infrastructure.
      9.4K
      860
      PROS OF DATADOG
      • 139
        Monitoring for many apps (databases, web servers, etc)
      • 107
        Easy setup
      • 87
        Powerful ui
      • 84
        Powerful integrations
      • 70
        Great value
      • 54
        Great visualization
      • 46
        Events + metrics = clarity
      • 41
        Notifications
      • 41
        Custom metrics
      • 39
        Flexibility
      • 19
        Free & paid plans
      • 16
        Great customer support
      • 15
        Makes my life easier
      • 10
        Adapts automatically as i scale up
      • 9
        Easy setup and plugins
      • 8
        Super easy and powerful
      • 7
        AWS support
      • 7
        In-context collaboration
      • 6
        Rich in features
      • 5
        Docker support
      • 4
        Cost
      • 4
        Full visibility of applications
      • 4
        Monitor almost everything
      • 4
        Cute logo
      • 4
        Automation tools
      • 4
        Source control and bug tracking
      • 4
        Simple, powerful, great for infra
      • 4
        Easy to Analyze
      • 4
        Best than others
      • 3
        Best in the field
      • 3
        Expensive
      • 3
        Good for Startups
      • 3
        Free setup
      • 2
        APM
      CONS OF DATADOG
      • 20
        Expensive
      • 4
        No errors exception tracking
      • 2
        External Network Goes Down You Wont Be Logging
      • 1
        Complicated

      related Datadog posts

      Robert Zuber

      Our primary source of monitoring and alerting is Datadog. We’ve got prebuilt dashboards for every scenario and integration with PagerDuty to manage routing any alerts. We’ve definitely scaled past the point where managing dashboards is easy, but we haven’t had time to invest in using features like Anomaly Detection. We’ve started using Honeycomb for some targeted debugging of complex production issues and we are liking what we’ve seen. We capture any unhandled exceptions with Rollbar and, if we realize one will keep happening, we quickly convert the metrics to point back to Datadog, to keep Rollbar as clean as possible.

      We use Segment to consolidate all of our trackers, the most important of which goes to Amplitude to analyze user patterns. However, if we need a more consolidated view, we push all of our data to our own data warehouse running PostgreSQL; this is available for analytics and dashboard creation through Looker.

      See more
      Farzeem Diamond Jiwani
      Software Engineer at IVP · | 8 upvotes · 1.5M views

      Hey there! We are looking at Datadog, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic as options for our web application monitoring.

      Current Environment: .NET Core Web app hosted on Microsoft IIS

      Future Environment: Web app will be hosted on Microsoft Azure

      Tech Stacks: IIS, RabbitMQ, Redis, Microsoft SQL Server

      Requirement: Infra Monitoring, APM, Real - User Monitoring (User activity monitoring i.e., time spent on a page, most active page, etc.), Service Tracing, Root Cause Analysis, and Centralized Log Management.

      Please advise on the above. Thanks!

      See more
      Instana logo

      Instana

      82
      17
      Automatic Application and Infrastructure Monitoring
      82
      17
      PROS OF INSTANA
      • 4
        Flexible pricing
      • 4
        Easy to integrate
      • 3
        Insight into RCA
      • 3
        Self service
      • 2
        Simple query interface
      • 1
        Automatic
      CONS OF INSTANA
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        related Instana posts

        AppDynamics logo

        AppDynamics

        310
        68
        Application management for the cloud generation
        310
        68
        PROS OF APPDYNAMICS
        • 21
          Deep code visibility
        • 13
          Powerful
        • 8
          Real-Time Visibility
        • 7
          Great visualization
        • 6
          Easy Setup
        • 6
          Comprehensive Coverage of Programming Languages
        • 4
          Deep DB Troubleshooting
        • 3
          Excellent Customer Support
        CONS OF APPDYNAMICS
        • 5
          Expensive
        • 2
          Poor to non-existent integration with aws services

        related AppDynamics posts

        Farzeem Diamond Jiwani
        Software Engineer at IVP · | 8 upvotes · 1.5M views

        Hey there! We are looking at Datadog, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic as options for our web application monitoring.

        Current Environment: .NET Core Web app hosted on Microsoft IIS

        Future Environment: Web app will be hosted on Microsoft Azure

        Tech Stacks: IIS, RabbitMQ, Redis, Microsoft SQL Server

        Requirement: Infra Monitoring, APM, Real - User Monitoring (User activity monitoring i.e., time spent on a page, most active page, etc.), Service Tracing, Root Cause Analysis, and Centralized Log Management.

        Please advise on the above. Thanks!

        See more

        We are evaluating an APM tool and would like to select between AppDynamics or Datadog. Our applications are largely hosted on Microsoft Azure but we would keep the option to move to AWS or Google Cloud Platform in the future.

        In addition to core Azure services, we will be hosting other components - including MongoDB, Keycloak, PagerDuty, etc. Our applications are largely C# and React-based using frontend for Backend patterns and Azure API gateway. In addition, there are close to 50+ external services integrated using both REST and SOAP.

        See more
        SignalFx logo

        SignalFx

        53
        22
        Monitoring and Operational Intelligence for the Cloud
        53
        22
        PROS OF SIGNALFX
        • 5
          High cardinality
        • 5
          Scalability
        • 4
          World class customer support
        • 4
          Easy to install
        • 4
          Fastest alerts
        CONS OF SIGNALFX
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          related SignalFx posts

          Zipkin logo

          Zipkin

          154
          10
          A distributed tracing system
          154
          10
          PROS OF ZIPKIN
          • 10
            Open Source
          CONS OF ZIPKIN
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            related Zipkin posts