Lightstep Inc., a software application observability startup founded by two former Google LLC engineers, said today it’s launching a new performance monitoring platform called “Change Intelligence” aimed at helping DevOps teams understand the state of their applications and systems in real-time.

Lightstep’s Change Intelligence platform works by automating the process of investigating any changes made to applications and systems as they happen.

Lightstep says it’s trying to deliver on the promise of artificial intelligence for IT operations. AIOps, as it’s known, refers to the process of collecting and aggregating data generated by multiple applications and systems in order to identify signals that relate to system performance and availability. The idea is that this data can be used to diagnose application issues faster, so teams can respond to them quickly.

But Lightstep says that AIOps tools simply don’t work as intended because they collect so much data that DevOps teams often find themselves overwhelmed.

“Companies are already drowning in data from dashboards, alerts, endless logs,” said Lightstep co-founder and Chief Architect Daniel Spoonhower. “But from talking with customers, we’ve learned that this can create just as many problems as it solves.”

Lightstep says its Change Intelligence platform helps DevOps teams sort through all of these signals and instantly understand the underlying cause of any changes to their applications. The secret sauce is its new time-series database, which is able to process more than a trillion “events” each day. It’s inspired by a similar in-memory time series database built by Google, called Monarch, which is used to monitor the availability, performance, load and other metrics of that company’s applications and systems.

Spoonhower and Lightstep Chief Executive Ben Sigelman helped to build the Monarch database during their time at Google. The Change Intelligence platform integrates the Monarch database with Lightstep’s existing distributed tracing data, giving DevOps teams a way to connect cause and effect much faster than was previously possible.

“We took inspiration from the technology we built at Google, took it to the next level, and made it generally available to all Lightstep users,” Sigelman said. “With Change Intelligence, any developer, operator, or SRE can instantly understand changes in their service’s health and what caused those changes. In this way, we’re able to actually deliver on the promise of AIOps: to automate the process of investigating changes within complex systems.”

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that with complex and challenging applications and systems landscapes, it has become key for enterprises to capture all of the data they create and recognize patterns within it.

“What’s needed are time-series databases, which are designed specifically for the job,” Mueller said. “Lightstep’s new offering brings key observability capabilities to DevOps teams looking to manage their next-generation applications.”

Lightstep said the Change Intelligence platform is generally available starting today.

Image: Lightstep