Plaid found what they were looking for with LightStep, which enables the team to spend less time debugging code — and more time releasing features to their customers. Homegrown Solution vs. LightStep Before moving to LightStep, Plaid rolled out a homegrown observability prototype backed by their existing logging stack: Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While this tech stack works well for logging, it became apparent almost immediately that tracing required a different solution. “Our Elasticsearch cluster is large, and when we tried to dump trace data, we realized we ingested far too high of a data volume. It only took 10 minutes before our data infrastructure team noticed,” said Omar Mezenner, Software Engineer at Plaid. “We realized in order to ingest data — or even to deploy

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