Lightstep was founded in 2015 by Ben Sigelman, Ben Cronin and Daniel Spoonhower — engineers who had built Google's internal Dapper distributed-tracing system — to bring large-scale distributed tracing to enterprises. ServiceNow acquired Lightstep in June 2021 and rebranded it ServiceNow Cloud Observability. On August 25, 2025, ServiceNow announced it is sunsetting Cloud Observability, with support ending March 1, 2026 (or a customer's subscription term end, whichever is later); ServiceNow has stated it will not offer a direct native replacement on the Now Platform and instead points customers to a preferred migration partner. This is a real, publicly documented end-of-life event that materially affects the product's current standing.