Lightstep Announces New GitHub Action, Bringing Observability Data Directly to GitHub to Avoid Problematic Code Deploys

cdCON -- Lightstep, the cutting-edge distributed tracing tool founded by former Google engineers, today announced their new GitHub Action called the Lightstep Pre-Deploy Check. By automatically bringing relevant Observability data directly into the development workflow on GitHub, software developers can ensure the quality and performance of their software, before it’s actually deployed.

"This is a big shift left for how developers think about Observability," said Daniel Spoonhower, Co-Founder and CTO of Lightstep. "DevOps is about acknowledging that it’s not good enough to ship code without worrying about how it performs in the real world. I very much believe in ‘you build it you own it’ -- but I also believe that we need to make this easier by baking solutions into existing development workflows as much as possible, by automating as much as possible."

According to the State of Software Quality 2020 report produced by OverOps, two out of three developers spend at least a day per week troubleshooting issues in their code, and are frustrated by the unknowns that come with deploying new code into cloud-based, distributed architectures. Despite the 87M+ merged pull requests per GitHub’s annual Octoverse report, to date there has been zero visibility into the health status of a system within a pull request.

"Automatically confirming production systems and services are healthy before deploying code that can impact them is a great step towards ensuring reliability, without compromising developer velocity," said Chris Patterson, Product Manager for GitHub Actions at GitHub. "By bringing Observability data directly into the pull request process on GitHub, developers can avoid context switching, gain more ownership of how their code performs in production, and better support DevOps within their organization."

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The Lightstep Pre-Deploy Check leverages publicly-available APIs from Lightstep to provide a deployment risk summary ahead of a code change going to a production environment. The information from the risk assessment is then automatically pulled directly into the GitHub pull request through a GitHub Action.

Lightstep has also partnered with Rollbar and PagerDuty to bring even more information directly into GitHub. For example, if Lightstep completes a risk assessment and determines that the system is unhealthy, it can automatically take a snapshot of the production behavior in real-time and send it to PagerDuty, so the full details of the issue can be examined even if the developer was not there at the moment the issue started.

"We see direct value to developer effectiveness with the Lightstep Pre-Deploy Check," said Steve Gross, Sr. Director, Strategic Ecosystem Development at PagerDuty. "Now developers automatically have PagerDuty on-call details inside of a pull request, alongside system health details, at their fingertips in one screen."

About Lightstep

Lightstep’s mission is to deliver confidence at scale for those who develop, operate and rely on today’s powerful software applications. Its products leverage distributed tracing technology – initially developed by a Lightstep co-founder at Google – to offer best-of-breed observability to organizations adopting microservices or serverless at scale. Lightstep is backed by Redpoint, Sequoia, Altimeter Capital, Cowboy Ventures, and Harrison Metal and is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. For more information, visit https://lightstep.com or follow @LightstepHQ.

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