E169: Building New Standards for Observability - Lightstep & OpenTelemetry

Open Source Startup Podcast

Ben Sigelman is the Co-Founder & CEO of observability platform Lightstep as well as Co-Creator of open source observability frameworks OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry.

Lightstep was acquired by ServiceNow in 2021 and OpenTelemetry was released in 2019 and has since become the standard observability framework.

In this episode, we dig into:

• The founding story for Lightstep - including the initial pivot into the idea

• The benefits Lightstep got from open sourcing OpenTracing

• The OpenTracing and OpenCensus merger into OpenTelemetry

• Why OpenTelemetry has been so widely adopted

• Ben's perspective on the many companies building with OpenTelemetry today

• How their team made the decision to take the ServiceNow acquisition

• Company building learnings around team building (& more!)