Lightstep provides unified observability for the enterprise. Founded by the founders of OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing, its leaders are at the forefront of the distributed tracing and observability movement. Lightstep’s reliability platform is one of the easiest ways for developers and SREs to monitor their distributed applications, ensure its health, and troubleshoot issues. From a distributed tracing viewpoint, Lightstep utilizes the OpenTelemetry standards to instrument your application and provides a trace data store and analytics platform which is nicely integrated with other observability metrics.
Tracetest leverages the observability provided by the traces stored in Lightstep to quickly build tests across your distributed architecture. Tests created in Tracetest can verify not only against the response from calls to your system, but it can also verify all the underlying processes that are exposed in the spans collected in the trace that is created as a result of the triggering of the test. This enables a distributed test to be created to verify the entire flow across multiple microservices.
Tracetest works with Lightstep via the OpenTelemetry Collector, which is the method recommended by the OpenTelemetry community to collect, process, and export trace data from your system. The OTel Collector is made to sit between your application and the trace data store, which is Lightstep in this case. Tracetest leverages the capabilities of the OpenTelemetry Collector to collect the traces that were generated by a Tracetest test and route this data directly to the Tracetest server.
You also continue to send your trace data to Lightstep, which provides you analytics across both your normal traces and the trace data created by trace-based tests in Tracetest. You can spot anomalies in Lightstep, diagnose them, and create Tracetests to prevent regressions in the future.
Tracetest allows you to select Lightstep as your trace data store and provides details on how to configure your OpenTelemetry Collector to create a second pipeline to route traces to Tracetest.
LightStep & Tracetest integration documentation
Using Lightstep with the OpenTelemetry Collector
Blog: Announcing the Tracetest integration with Lightstep, the cloud-native reliability platform
Blog: Tracetest in Action: Running Trace-Based Tests on the OpenTelemetry Demo App with Nomad And LighStep
