Case Study: Plaid achieves 20x faster integration-test root-cause identification with LightStep

Plaid Investigates CI/CD Issues 20x Faster with LightStep

Plaid, the fintech data network, was struggling to get real-time visibility into its polyglot microservices (Go, Node.js, Python) using a homegrown observability prototype built on Elasticsearch/Kibana/Logstash — ingestion volumes were too high and tracing required significant maintenance. Seeking a hosted distributed tracing solution, Plaid adopted LightStep (using features like Service Diagrams, Snapshots, and the LightStep API) to solve incomplete cross-service visibility and slow CI/CD failure diagnosis.

LightStep delivered real-time Service Diagrams and automated Snapshots that let engineers trace failures down to specific MySQL queries and capture failing CI test traces automatically. With LightStep, Plaid cut the time to identify the root cause of integration test failures by 20x (from roughly an hour to about three minutes), avoided hiring one or more full-time engineers to manage observability, and freed engineers to spend more time building features.

Plaid

Omar Mezenner

Software Engineer