Faster application troubleshooting with SLOs, Lens, and Differential Diagnosis

When a service goes down or starts acting up in the middle of the night, engineers often find themselves thrust into “firefighting” mode. They scramble to diagnose and resolve incidents, often on dreaded bridge calls that stretch into the early hours of the morning.

But what if you could pinpoint the root cause of a service disruption and get things back on track before your coffee even cools down? With the latest updates to Chronosphere, you can.

Chronosphere is thrilled to announce the launch of several new capabilities, all designed to simplify and speed up troubleshooting: 

• Pinned Scopes and Change Events in Chronosphere Lens
• Differential Diagnosis (DDx) for Distributed Tracing
• Service Level Objectives (SLOs), currently in preview

These features tackle some of the biggest challenges developers face when trying to keep containerized and microservices systems running smoothly—without the need for endless escalations and bridge calls or lengthy investigations.

Let’s dive into what these new and upcoming features bring to the table and how they help developers resolve issues faster, stay focused, and—most importantly—get back to sleep.

One of the most common frustrations developers face during incident response is losing context as they move between different observability tools or even between screens of the same tool. Chronosphere Lens, designed to provide contextual insights across all service data, now features two major updates—Pinned Scopes and Change Events in Service Views—that make the incident resolution process smoother and more efficient.

• Pinned Scopes allow developers to keep critical context throughout their troubleshooting workflows. Say you’re tracking a spike in error rates across a specific service; Pinned Scopes ensure that this focus stays with you as you move between different telemetry views. This eliminates the tedious task of reapplying filters or manually searching for relevant data as you navigate from service to service or from metrics, to traces, to logs. By maintaining a consistent view across the platform, developers can stay focused and significantly reduce cognitive load during high-pressure incident investigations.
• Change Events in Service Views provide immediate visibility into why performance changes, helping teams quickly assess whether recent deployments, configuration updates, or other alterations are behind a service performance issue. Chronosphere Lens integrates change data directly into its Service Views, allowing you to test hypotheses like, “Was this caused by the deploy that just went out?” without having to dig through thousands of events. These capabilities make it easier to correlate performance issues with actual changes, speeding up the process of identifying root causes.

For developers and businesses, this means more efficient triaging, faster problem resolution, and a smoother, more consistent workflow during high-stakes troubleshooting scenarios. With Pinned Scopes and Change Events, your teams can reduce firefighting time and focus more on delivering innovative features.

In complex microservices environments, tracing the root cause of service failures can feel like finding a needle in a haystack. Developers must form hypotheses about the source of the problem, sift through mountains of data, and often loop back to square one when the initial hypothesis doesn’t pan out. This approach is slow, inefficient, and prone to error, which is why Chronosphere is proud to introduce Differential Diagnosis (DDx)—a groundbreaking new capability within our Distributed Tracing solution.

DDx offers developers a powerful, intuitive, and query-free workflow to quickly isolate service slowdowns or failures. It dramatically simplifies the troubleshooting process, making it accessible to developers of all skill levels. DDx automatically highlights the most likely causes of issues, enabling developers to focus on testing and validating the most likely hypotheses quickly, rather than manually sifting through telemetry data or waiting for more experienced colleagues to help.

Key benefits of DDx include:

• Automated Insights from trace data: DDx analyzes trace data to identify the most probable root causes of issues, helping teams pinpoint the source of problems faster.
• One-Click Analysis: Developers can dig deeper into specific traces or metrics with just one click, reducing the time spent hunting for relevant data.
• Intuitive and flexible UI:  The user-friendly interface makes it simple for developers of any experience level to investigate problems, reducing the reliance on senior team members.

With DDx, you don’t need to be an expert in microservices or system architecture to resolve incidents. Developers of all skill and experience levels can benefit from DDx, including the experts. This means fewer delays, reduced reliance on senior team members, and—most importantly—faster incident resolution, ensuring your users experience minimal downtime.

While Lens and DDx are immediately available and already transforming how developers troubleshoot issues, we’re equally excited to announce the upcoming release of Chronosphere’s SLO (Service Level Objectives) capabilities, now in preview.

SLOs are critical for teams striving to balance system reliability with the need for innovation. By setting measurable targets for service performance—such as error rates, latency, or availability—SLOs give teams an objective framework for understanding whether a service is performing as expected from a user’s perspective. However, for many organizations, setting up and managing SLOs has historically been challenging, especially in the fast-evolving world of microservices.

Chronosphere’s new SLO capability, currently in preview, is designed to make SLO adoption simpler, faster, and more effective in microservices and open-source environments. Here’s what makes it stand out:

• Queryless Setup: You don’t need to know complex query languages or manually configure monitoring tools. Chronosphere’s intuitive interface allows service owners to define SLOs quickly, removing barriers for teams new to SLO adoption.
• Dynamic SLO Management: Chronosphere automatically tracks new service endpoints as they’re added, eliminating the need for manual updates and ensuring that your SLOs stay relevant, even as your services evolve.
• Context-Aware Troubleshooting: If a burn-rate alert is triggered, Chronosphere provides the contextual dimensions necessary to troubleshoot issues efficiently, ensuring faster problem resolution.

As this feature is still in preview, we’re actively working with early users to fine-tune and perfect its capabilities. General availability is expected in early 2025.

Chronosphere’s new capabilities—Pinned Scopes, Change Events in Service Views, and Differential Diagnosis (DDx)—are designed to make troubleshooting faster, more efficient, and accessible to developers of all skill levels. And with the upcoming release of SLO capabilities, teams will be better equipped to manage the balance between system reliability and innovation in increasingly complex microservices environments.

Whether you’re a seasoned developer dealing with microservices complexity or a newer team member working through your first major incident, these tools empower you to resolve issues faster and reduce downtime for your customers. So the next time a service misbehaves at 3 a.m., you can quickly identify the root cause, resolve the problem, and get back to sleep—without having to call in reinforcements.

Stay tuned for more updates on the official release of our SLO feature, and in the meantime, explore our interactive demos of Chronosphere Lens and DDx to see how these features can transform your incident resolution process today. See all of these capabilities in action here.