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Lightstep and Rollbar have formed a new partnership, which will improve developer experience with error monitoring.
The integration of Rollbar will allow developers to remove the guesswork from the error resolution path, giving developers time back to focus on shipping quality code.
Previously announced, Lightstep, a distributed tracing tool founded by former Google engineers, released 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 organisation.”
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 behaviour 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.”
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