Case Study: Lyft achieves 60% faster ride-request times and quicker incident resolution with LightStep

Lightstep Enables Lyft’s Move to Microservices, Helping Drive Significant Revenue and Improving Product Efficiency

Lyft, the San Francisco–based ridesharing company, faced a critical challenge as it moved from a monolith to 200+ microservices: ensuring millisecond-level performance for more than one million rides per day and observing 100% of application performance data to avoid revenue‑costly latency and outages. To tackle this, Lyft deployed LightStep alongside Envoy (the service mesh) to gain end‑to‑end visibility across mobile and backend services.

LightStep’s SaaS tracing and analytics integrated with Envoy to provide automatic, full-fidelity distributed traces and advanced statistics on all traffic, letting engineers pinpoint root causes quickly. Using LightStep, Lyft removed unnecessary calls and optimized dispatch paths (improving call time by up to 60% / ~250 ms), parallelized payment processing (saving ~3 seconds, ~60% improvement), and cut root‑cause analysis time by about 60%, reducing outages and driving better customer experiences, higher dispatch efficiency, and increased revenue.

Lyft

Pete Morelli

Vice President of Engineering