Title
Nonintrusive Monitoring of Microservice-Based Systems
Abstract
Breaking large software systems into smaller functionally interconnected components is a trend on the rise. This architectural style, known as “microservices”, simplifies development, deployment and management at the expense of complexity and observability. In fact, in large scale systems, it is particularly difficult to determine the set of microservices responsible for delaying a client's request, when one module impacts several other microservices in a cascading effect. Components cannot be analyzed in isolation, and without instrumenting their source code extensively, it is difficult to find the bottlenecks and trace their root causes. To mitigate this problem, we propose a much simpler approach: log gateway activity, to register all calls to and between microservices, as well as their responses, thus enabling the extraction of topology and performance metrics, without changing source code. For validation, we implemented the proposed platform, with a microservices-based application that we observe under load. Our results show that we can extract relevant performance information with a negligible effort, even in legacy systems, where instrumenting modules may be a very expensive task.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/NCA.2018.8548311
2018 IEEE 17th International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (NCA)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Black-box monitoring,Gateway,Microservices
Observability,Software deployment,Computer science,Source code,Software system,Default gateway,Microservices,Legacy system,Architectural style,Distributed computing
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-5386-7660-8
0
0.34
References 
Authors
5
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Fabio Pina100.34
Jaime Correia202.03
Ricardo Filipe332.44
Filipe Araujo421424.63
Jorge Cardroom500.34