ServiceNow Inc. today announced plans to acquire LightStep, a DevOps observability platform Lightstep Inc. to expand its monitoring capabilities for cloud-native applications.

ServiceNow is a workflow automation platform for optimizing productivity for information technology and operations, with the addition of LightStep, DevOps engineers will gain deep systematic observability capabilities to detect problems before they affect customers.

The concept of “observability” deals with gathering information from raw data drawn from logs generated by clients and servers and producing actionable insights.

“Today, observability primarily benefits the DevOps teams that build and operate mission-critical apps,” said Ben Sigelman, co-founder and chief executive at Lightstep. “We’ve always believed that the value of observability should extend across the entire enterprise.”

Lightstep claims clients such as GitHub, Spotify AB and Twilio Inc. Each of these platforms uses cloud-based apps that span large regions and rely heavily on high reliability to provide massive scalability for data delivery.

With Lightstep, engineers have an early warning system that provides them the ability to monitor critical signals and indicators of software health that will now integrate directly with ServiceNow’s platform.

Once a problem is discovered, it can be headed off before it becomes a bottleneck or an avalanche. Lightstep’s platform’s systemic approach to observability combined with ServiceNow’s organizationwide automation puts these two necessary steps side-by-side.

“With Lightstep, ServiceNow will transform how software solutions are delivered to customers,” said Pablo Stern, senior vice president of IT Workflow Products at ServiceNow. “This will ultimately make it easier for customers to innovate quickly. Now they’ll be able to build and operate their software faster than ever before and take the new era of work head-on with confidence.”

Details of the deal were not disclosed. ServiceNow expects to complete the acquisition in the second quarter of 2021.

Image: Lightstep