Case Study: DigitalOcean saves 1,000 developer hours per month and accelerates root-cause analysis with LightStep

DigitalOcean uses LightStep as a Source of Truth for its Distributed System, Saving 1000 Hours of Developer Time per Month

DigitalOcean, a fast-growing cloud platform, struggled to maintain visibility and perform root cause analysis across a polyglot, distributed system with globally distributed engineering teams. To create a single source of truth for service performance and cross-team diagnostics, DigitalOcean adopted LightStep as its application performance management solution, instrumenting services with OpenTracing to provide real-time, end-to-end traces and shared dashboards.

LightStep was implemented across DigitalOcean’s RPC layer and incorporated into the company-wide service generator so new microservices are immediately traceable; teams also built 144 visible dashboards to promote transparency. As a result, LightStep now monitors 100+ apps, reduced root cause analysis to minutes (often under 15 minutes), and saved roughly 1,000 developer hours per month while improving accountability and system-wide visibility.

DigitalOcean

Dave Smith

Sr. Director of Engineering