AWS X-Ray vs LightStep: What are the differences?

What is AWS X-Ray? An application performance management service. It helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture. With this, you can understand how your application and its underlying services are performing to identify and troubleshoot the root cause of performance issues and errors. It provides an end-to-end view of requests as they travel through your application, and shows a map of your application’s underlying components.

What is LightStep? A fast way for developers and DevOps to adopt best-of-breed distributed tracing. It diagnoses anomalies and slowdowns, spanning mobile, monoliths, and micro services: best-in-class observability, at scale, for modern applications.

AWS X-Ray and LightStep can be categorized as "Performance Monitoring" tools.

Some of the features offered by AWS X-Ray are:

• End-to-end tracing
• AWS Service and Database Integrations
• Support for Multiple Languages

On the other hand, LightStep provides the following key features:

• ANALYZE EVERY TRANSACTION
• MEASURE PERFORMANCE WHERE IT MATTERS MOST
• PINPOINT THE ROOT CAUSE