People
Ben Sigelman
Co-created OpenTelemetry, co-founded Lightstep (sold to ServiceNow), overall nerd
Most of my career has revolved around software introspection and observability, particularly in large, distributed systems.
This work began at Google where I helped to design and develop the Dapper distributed tracing project (2005-2009) and the Monarch production monitoring system (2009-2012). I left Google in 2012, was involved with some failed consumer tech experiments, then started Lightstep with my cofounders in 2015.
Lightstep was [mostly 😅] a lot of fun, particularly the bits involving our team (exceptional, yet humble and approachable) and our customers (who inspired us by delivering software that powers our daily lives!). Along the way, I helped to create OpenTracing in 2016, which became OpenTelemetry in 2019 – though of course the success of these open-source initiatives is largely due to the breadth and depth of the communities supporting them.
Lightstep was acquired by ServiceNow in 2021, and I remained there for three years as the General Manager for their observability business. It was fun to combine the world of bleeding-edge, cloud-native software with the rigor and governance of mature ServiceNow deployments at many of the world's largest companies.
