Case Study: Twilio achieves five 9s of availability and a 92% reduction in MTTR with LightStep

Twilio Engineer Shares How They Achieve Five 9s of Availability

Twilio, a cloud-native company built on distributed microservices, needed better observability to manage the complexity of its Programmable Video systems and to meet strict reliability targets like five 9s of availability. To give engineers a compelling reason to adopt a new tool, Twilio integrated LightStep for distributed tracing and performance monitoring across its services.

By using LightStep for tracing, tagging and p99/outlier analysis—integrated into Game Days and linked to PagerDuty and Slack and formalized in Twilio’s Operational Maturity Model—Twilio cut mean time to resolution by 92%, improved mean latency for critical services by about 70%, and can now detect failures before they impact customers. LightStep’s visibility also helped overcome internal resistance and is a required part of Twilio’s production-readiness checks.

Twilio

Tyler Wells

Director of Engineering