How Drata Improves MTTR by 30% with Lightrun

Lightrun reduces costs for logging and observability while further enhancing customer experience

About Drata 

Drata is a continuous security and compliance automation platform that streamlines customers’ risk and compliance journeys across 14+ frameworks, regulations, and standards such as  SOC2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, GDPR, HIPAA, and more. Through an automation-led approach, Drata enables continuous control monitoring so companies of all sizes can achieve and maintain compliance over time and stay audit ready. 

Thousands of leading companies use Drata to automate their risk and compliance programs, continuously monitor their controls, and scale securely.

The Challenge

Enable developers to troubleshoot quickly, from their own dev environments

As a business-critical platform for their customers, Drata developers are constantly focused on providing a functional and dynamic platform that helps its customers stay audit ready. 

When it came to production improvements, the team realized that having to edit code and produce a new build each time they needed to add new logging to the system created repetitive processes backlogged by support tickets. Drata was looking for a better way to streamline the overall process while reducing the overall cost of logging. 

With Lightrun, Drata is able to add logging dynamically, on the fly, without a complete CI/CD build cycle and redeployments. Observability is put fully in the hands of developers. 

Where appropriate, the new observability is piped to their APM/Observability system; but for short-lived investigations where that’s not necessary, Lightrun lets developers add logging, get the info they need, then remove the logging – all without ever changing the code or producing a new build. 

The Solution

Adding on-demand, real-time observability with Lightrun 

Understanding the state of the running processes on a production machine traditionally relies on looking at existing application logs or attaching a remote debugger.  

Prior to using Lightrun, Drata engineers used to have to follow these steps: 

1. Determine which piece of the code needed extra visibility. 
2. Add the required logs and measurements at the relevant places. 
3. Deploy a new release to the production server. 
4. Inspect the given information, and repeat the process all over again with new analysis. 

With Lightrun’s platform In-IDE experience, Drata was able to significantly optimize the above process, directly from the developer environment, while saving on time and costs.

Drata’s new troubleshooting process now consists of a simple 2-step process: 

1. Add snapshots and logs to the relevant code. 
2. Observe all the information immediately inside developer’s IDE or APM. 

“We’ve experienced immediate value from the moment our developer team began using Lightrun; we were able to efficiently fix dozens of tickets on a monthly basis and our observability consumption moved more into the engineers IDE.”   Alec Barba, Full Stack Engineer at Drata 

The Results

Using Lightrun platform, Drata developers were able to improve MTTR by 30% 

Using Lightrun, Drata developers eliminate bottlenecks by reducing the overall MTTR. Drata was also able to reduce the volume and costs of logs and storage that the engineering team was previously consuming. Overall, Lightrun empowered Drata to further enhance the production environment for a more seamless and reliable customer experience.  

“Drata’s main focus is to ensure we’re delivering value for our customers and addressing their most urgent needs; we embrace that approach across the entire organization. Leveraging Lightrun to significantly streamline logging has allowed us to remediate faster without shifting our focus away from critical business initiatives.”    Dave Knell, VP Software Engineering at Drata