Former Google employees found start-up to transform application management

An ex Google employee is looking to transform the way firms manage apps.

A trio of former employees from internet giant Google have launched a start-up company intended to transform the way that companies manage application performance management (APM).

With the support of venture capital firms Redpoint, Cowboy Ventures, Harrison Metal and Sequoia, LightStep has raised $29m to accerate development of its new performance management tool.

It has developed a solution that, it claims, enables companies to apply APM's core value proposition across a variety of technology areas, including web, mobile, monolithic applications and microservices.

With the tool, companies can easily monitor and troubleshoot applications for performance issues. It works with both on-premise and cloud infrastructure.

Companies often struggle to find bottlenecks and resolve incidents smoothly, the company claims, but LightStep will provide an accurate snapchat of the entire software ecosystem.

The company was co-founded by Ben Sigelman, who built and ran global monitoring technologies at Google. He is already working with the likes of Twilio, Lyft, Yext, GitHub and DigitalOcean.

He established the company to address challenges faced by enterprises building complex software. It is looking to accelerate software development and eradicate operational complexity.

According to the company, existing APM software fails to provide businesses with accurate real-time insights, and they end up relying on legacy infrastructure.

The product uses a decentralised architecture that constantly analyses transactions across all services, letting customers measure the performance areas impacting their businesses.

In particular, it focuses on microservices, key mobile transitions, crucial customer accounts and individual end-users. There's also a built-in statistical engine that can detect anomalies and record detailed end-to-end traces.

This trace gives organisations a cross-service contact so they can address performance problems quickly. It claims that "customers take seconds or minutes to resolve incidents that previously required days of investigations".

Transport app Lyft, a rival to Uber, has created a distributed architecture with LightStep. Pete Morelli, vice president of engineering at the firm, said: "LightStep is the future of monitoring and was instrumental in our move to microservices.

"Our systems generate more than 100 billion microservice calls per day. LightStep is one of the only systems that can make sense of that firehose: it jumps to the root cause of performance problems anywhere from mobile all the way to the bottom of our distributed stack."

Sigelman added: "I have seen software development change rapidly in the last decade, and I believe we are entering a new era.

"Today, enterprise IT and engineering leaders preside over complex, business-critical software applications that operate at a daunting scale.

"We built LightStep to deliver products, beginning with LightStep [x]PM, that cut through the complexity of today's production software and keep our customers in control."

Daniel Conde, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, said: "Today's production applications do not come from a single mold.

"There will be microservices as well as monolithic applications, and deployments will be on bare metal services and on hybrid cloud platforms.

"These need to co-exist and integrate with each other, so a modern application performance monitoring solution needs to gather data from across the enterprise with all of these models."