ServiceNow Cloud Observability (formerly LightStep) vs. Netdata

Lightstep’s observability platform is the easiest way for developers and SREs to monitor health and respond to changes in cloud-native applications. Powered by cutting-edge distributed tracing and a groundbreaking metrics database, and built by the team that launched observability at Google, Lightstep’s Change Intelligence provides actionable insights to help teams answer the question “What caused that change? Lightstep empowers reliability and observability managers to minimize the impact of outages, improve software performance, and build org-wide standards to drive adoption and automation.

Netdata is a real-time observability platform with agentic AI troubleshooting that covers the full stack in one product: infrastructure, containers and Kubernetes, databases, networks, cloud services, logs, distributed traces and digital experience. It installs in minutes, finds what's running on its own, and starts monitoring right away. Dashboards, ready-made alerts and machine-learning anomaly detection on every metric work out of the box, with no configuration and no query language. Netdata AI works as an on-call engineer.