Cloud Observability

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Cloud Observability

    ServiceNow Cloud Observability provides a unified platform that integrates metrics, logs, and traces into a single workflow to help you detect and respond quickly to changes in both cloud-native and monolithic applications. This solution accelerates issue resolution, enhances collaboration among site reliability engineers (SREs), DevOps, and IT Operations teams, and supports better business outcomes by harmonizing practices across teams.

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    Key Features

    • Unified Telemetry Data: Combines critical telemetry data such as metrics, logs, and traces into one platform for comprehensive visibility.
    • OpenTelemetry Support: Uses OpenTelemetry, a vendor-agnostic framework for collecting telemetry data, allowing integration with a wide range of open-source and commercial tools.
    • Service Graph Connector for OpenTelemetry: Enables ingestion of large volumes of open-source telemetry data into the ServiceNow Configuration Management Database (CMDB), improving asset and service relationship tracking.
    • Comprehensive Observability Data Types:
      • Metrics: Numeric data measuring system or business performance over time.
      • Logs: Time-stamped text records of events or errors useful for troubleshooting.
      • Traces: Detailed data capturing the flow of requests through distributed systems to identify bottlenecks.

    Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    • Quickly gain insights into system health without needing deep internal knowledge of the system.
    • Efficient troubleshooting by correlating diverse telemetry data to identify root causes.
    • Improved productivity and collaboration across SRE, DevOps, and IT Ops teams.
    • Leverage open-source telemetry data in your CMDB with certified connectors, reducing integration risks.

    Gain insights to detect and quickly respond to changes in cloud-native and monolithic applications.

    Capabilities that scale with your business

    Observability enables you to unify metrics, logs, and traces into a single workflow. With ServiceNow Cloud Observability (formerly  Lightstep), navigate easily from effect to cause, and untether developer productivity and efficiency.

    View and download the data sheet to learn more about Cloud Observability.

    Cloud Observability offers a holistic solution that unifies critical telemetry data in a unified platform so that you can resolve cloud-native service issues faster, enhance cross-team collaboration, and harmonize site reliability engineers (SREs), DevOps, and IT Ops practices to deliver better business outcomes. 

    Cloud Observability Workflow

    Cloud Observability Workflow diagram

    Important Links

    Cloud Observability log-in page

    Log in to the product

    Documentation

    Cloud Observability learning portal

    APIs

    Interact with Cloud Observability programmatically

    GitHub

    Visit Cloud Observability's GitHub presence

    Learn

    • What is Observability?

      Observability is the ability to quickly and efficiently gain insight into the health of your tech estate by gathering, correlating, and interpreting metrics, distributed traces, and log data. It lets you understand a system from the outside without knowing its inner workings. It also allows you to troubleshoot, handle problems, and answer the question, “Why is this happening"?

    • What is OpenTelemetry?

      OpenTelemetry is an  observability  framework and toolkit designed to create and manage  telemetry data  such as  traces,  metrics, and  logs. It’s vendor- and tool-agnostic, so you can use it with a broad variety of open-source tools, as well as commercial offerings. OpenTelemetry is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)  project.

    • What are metrics?

      Metrics are structured data that contain numeric values that measure a particular item over time, such as a business key performance indicator or the number of subscribers to a website. Metrics can be used to track the performance of a system or business and identify trends and patterns over time.

    • What are logs?

      A log is a text record of an incident that occurred at a specific time. It includes a timestamp, a unique ID for the component involved, and a description of the event or error. Logs can be stored as plain text, binary data, or structured files, with the latter being especially useful for observability because they’re easy to query.

    • What are traces?

      Traces are data that flow through a distributed system from start to finish. They're uniquely identified and contain important metadata, such as the microservice or serverless function that processes a request. Traces are useful for understanding the flow of requests through a system and identifying bottlenecks or other issues.

    • What is the Service Graph Connector for OpenTelemetry?

      Service Graph Connectors (SGC) enable you to load large volumes of data quickly and easily into your CMDB. The SGC for OpenTelemetry is a bit different from most, because, for the first time in ServiceNow history, you can bring open-source data into the CMDB. This connector offers the benefits of a thriving open-source community and is certified by the ServiceNow Service Graph Connectors Program that mitigates the risk associated with third-party integrations.