Lightstep has announced the addition of incident response management to their observability platform. The general availability of Lightstep Incident Response provides integrations with common collaboration tools, rotation scheduling, escalation policies, APIs, and a CLI.
Lightstep Incident Response integrates with a number of common monitoring and collaboration tools. This includes LogicMonitor, Postman, Sumo Logic, Grafana, Zoom, and Slack. An API is available to enable building connectors for tools without one out of the box. With the acquisition of Lightstep by ServiceNow in 2021, there is a tight integration with ServiceNow's Now Platform. This facilitates integrating the teams, configurations, and data within ServiceNow into Lightstep Incident Response.
Lightstep Incident Response provides tooling for managing on-call schedules. The schedules are synchronized onto a shared calendar to provide a single location to see all individuals currently on-call. The scheduling tool can automatically recommend users that have the most free capacity to fill gaps in the schedule. If an alert is triggered, notifications can be routed to individuals via email, SMS, or via the mobile app. The mobile app is available from both the Google Play store and the App Store and is available with each Lightstep Incident Response license.
Teams can be created to manage both on-call schedules and escalation policies. It is possible to add multiple teams to a single incident. When a team is added to an incident, the escalation policies will dictate how the incident notification is handled. In addition to adding teams to incidents, individuals can be specifically added. Lightstep Incident Response supports a Stakeholder role which cannot be placed on-call. Instead these users will only receive email notifications regarding incidents they are included on.
Automation of common tasks is possible through the interface. This includes automatically inviting individuals to incidents based on tags or setting up automated post mortems once an incident is resolved. Automation can also be created to self-triage and automatically remediate common issues.
The release includes a command line interface (CLI) that facilitates executing a number of common commands with Lightstep Incident Response. For example, an alert can be created with a description, priority, and source with the following command:
lightstep alert create --desc 'VPN Service breakdown' --priority 1 --source 'VPN Client'
That alert can then be acknowledged by executing lightstep alert ack --alert 'Alert0010006' where Alert0010006 is the alert number corresponding to the alert being acknowledged.
Lightstep Incident Response is able to be integrated with a number of platforms including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Within AWS, it is possible to integrate with Amazon CloudWatch so that CloudWatch alerts are sent to Lightstep which then manages the incident response. Similar integrations are available with Azure Monitor and Google Monitor.
The release follows closely a similar release from Grafana. Grafana recently introduced Grafana Incident, currently in preview, to tackle incident management and Grafana OnCall to facilitate on-call rotation scheduling. Both services integrate with the Grafana monitoring interface.
Lightstep Incident Response has both free and paid versions available. The pricing model is based on the number of active services managed, not the number of individuals licensed.
