Lightstep

Overview

ServiceNow Cloud Observability, formerly known as Lightstep, helps you detect changes in your logs, metrics, and traces. Integrate Lightstep with Cortex to drive insights into SLOs and latency and error rate metrics.

How to configure Lightstep with Cortex

Prerequisite

Before getting started, create a Lightstep API key.

Configure the integration in Cortex

1. In Cortex, navigate to the Lightstep settings page:

   1. In Cortex, click your avatar in the lower left corner, then click Settings.

   2. Under "Integrations", click Lightstep.

2. Click Add configuration.

3. Configure the Lightstep integration form:

   • Org ID: Enter your Lightstep organization ID.

     • You can find this in your Lightstep project settings.

   • Project ID: Enter the Lightstep project ID.

     • You can find this in your Lightstep project URL, e.g., https://app.lightstep.com/PROJECT_ID/project

   • API key: Enter the API key you generated in Lightstep.

4. Click Save.

Linking SLOs in Cortex

You can create and manage SLOs by listing relevant latency SLIs through Streams. Cortex will pull data from Lightstep, and track against your specified SLO. For example:

x-cortex-slos:
  lightstep:
    - streamId: sc4jmdXT
      targets:
        latency:
          - percentile: 0.5
            target: 2
            slo: 0.9995

Field	Description
streamId	ID of your Lightstep stream, which can be found in Lightstep, through the URL. https://app.lightstep.com//stream/my-stream/
percentile	Percentile latency for your given streamId, out of 1
target	Latency targets in ms. Latency is currently the only target supported
slo	SLO percentile, out of 1

Expected results

Entity pages

When an SLO is defined in an entity's descriptor, you'll see detailed data about SLOs in the Overview tab.

On the left side of an entity, click Monitoring > Lightstep to view the SLO query, target(s), current value for each SLO, a graph of SLO performance over time, and the period of time the SLO is being calculated for. For example, if the time listed is "7 days ago," then the SLO is looking at the time range starting 7 days ago to now.

Scorecards and CQL

With the Lightstep integration, you can create Scorecard rules and write CQL queries based on Lightstep SLOs.

See more examples in the CQL Explorer in Cortex.

SLOs

SLOs associated with the entity via ID or tags. You can use this data to check whether an entity has SLOs associated with it, and if those SLOs are passing.

Definition: slos: List<SLO>

Example

In a Scorecard, you can use this expression to make sure an entity is passing its SLOs:

slos().all((slo) => slo.passing) == true

Use this expression to make sure latency Service Level Indicator (SLI) value is above 99.99%:

slos().filter((slo) => slo.name.matchesIn("latency") and slo.sliValue >= 0.9999).length > 0

Still need help?​

The following options are available to get assistance from the Cortex Customer Engineering team:

• Email: [email protected], or open a support ticket in the in app Resource Center

• Chat: Available in the Resource Center

• Slack: Users with a connected Slack channel will have a workflow added to their account. From here, you can either @CortexTechnicalSupport or add a :ticket: reaction to a question in Slack, and the team will respond directly.

Don’t have a Slack channel? Talk with your Customer Success Manager.