Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Lightstep
Understand complex systems with one line of code for free
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Lightstep launched in 2020; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
How quickly can you debug an error in a distributed system?
2019 · its alternatives →
- 2LS
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3
- 4
The most powerful product analytics, for free
2021 · its alternatives →
- 5
a sub-second, open source, self hosted stream from OBS
2021 · its alternatives →
- 6
Free forever website monitoring & status pages 🤩
2018 · its alternatives →
- 7DA
Hey HN! I’ve written a bunch of WebSocket servers over the years to do simple things like state synchronization, WebRTC signaling, and notifying a client when a backend job was run. I realized that if I had a simple way to create a private, temporary, mini-redis that the client could talk to directly, it would save a lot of time. So we created DriftDB. In addition to the open source server that you can run yourself, we also provide https://jamsocket.live where you can use an instance we host on Cloudflare’s edge (~13ms round trip latency from my home in NY). You may have seen my…
2023 · driftdb.com · its alternatives →
- 8
- 9
Trace LLM requests + costs with OpenTelemetry monitoring
Oct 2025 · openlit.io · its alternatives →
- 10
Collaborate with commenting, annotations, and faster sharing
2020 · its alternatives →
- 11
Build something amazing! CDN, Observability, KV Store + more
2024 · fastly.com · its alternatives →
- 12
- 13YD
If you've built any web-based app in the last 15 years, you probably used something like Datadog, New Relic, Sentry, etc. to monitor and trace your app, right? Why should it be different when the app you're building happens to be using LLMs? So today we're open-sourcing OpenLLMetry-JS. It's an open protocol and SDK, based on OpenTelemetry, that provides traces and metrics for LLM JS/TS applications and can be connected to any of the 15+ tools that already support OpenTelemetry. Here's the repo: https://github.com/traceloop/openllmetry-js A few months ago we launched…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14OO
Hey HN, Nir, Gal and Tomer here. We’re open-sourcing a set of extensions we’ve built on top of OpenTelemetry that provide visibility into LLM applications - whether it be prompts, vector DBs and more. Here’s the repo: https://github.com/traceloop/openllmetry. There’s already a decent number of tools for LLM observability, some open-source and some not. But what we found was missing for all of them is that they were closed-protocol by design, vendor-locking you to use their observability platform or their proprietary framework for running your LLMs. It’s still early in the…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
- 16DT
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Dynamically instrument Live applications from your IDE
2023 · its alternatives →
- 18
Hi HN, we're Kiran and Vijay! Over the past two years, we have built a columnar storage engine for observability: logs, metrics, and traces. Today, it's exciting for us to show what we've built on top of that foundation: LLM Agent Observability. Given how non-deterministic agents are, storing all traces without sampling was critical for us. But these traces tend to be in the MBs, sometimes GBs - we needed to store them inexpensively. We also needed the queries and analyses to be fast. To meet both these goals, we store them in S3 in our own parquet-like file format, and query them using AWS…
Jul 2026 · oodle.ai · its alternatives →
- 19
- 20NO
Morning HN - - I have a quick story about building a startup and misreading the market, and an ask. (The ask: Try out our product>> https://app.datable.io/auth/sandbox) My name is Julian Giuca and I was an early employee at New Relic, where I led their Logging product until 2022. It’s safe to say I have opinions about logs. Sometimes I think they are great. Too often I think we can do much better. When people talk to me about logs, they reliably complain about observability costs. Engineering leaders have said it feels “like a protection racket”, where you're forced to…
2025 · its alternatives →
- 21
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- 23MA
Hey everyone! We've been working with several MCP server maintainers and we noticed some difficulties getting drop-in logging and identity attribution working out of the box with existing vendors. A couple of challenges we hoped to solve were: - Baseline piping of tool calls to traditional vendors - How to tie tool calls to a “user session” - Understanding the context behind tool calls made by agents So we built something. :) The MCPcat library is completely free to use, MIT licensed, and provides a one-line solution for adding logging and observability to any vendor that supports…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24MY
LLM observability is an absolute must-have for anyone running something in prod (or prod-like). While all the observability startups are great, you're essentially sending all your OpenAI usage history - prompts, generations, chats - to a random third party. So this script deploys a basic proxy in your Azure account, catches all incoming OpenAI requests, stores logs in your own resource group, and comes with visualizations premade (charts, timelines, chat history, cost estimation, etc). Thanks for any thoughts and feedback!
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →