μ Viz: Visualization of Microservices

Microservice architectures have become very popular and widely adopted by the industry, because of the benefits they bring to the software development process and resulting systems, such as parallel development, modularity and scalability. However, as interfaces become more fine-grained and systems grown in size, complexity is moved from the component services to their interactions, eventually leading to intricate workflows that are hard to observe, visualize, and understand. This problem is compounded by the typically high workloads that produce intractable amounts of observation data. To deal with these challenges, operators need support from tools able to take in observation data, in particular tracing, and provide a fast and intuitive understanding of which components or workflows require attention and how are they affecting a module, service, instance, or the whole application. In this paper, we present the design of a microservice visualization application that can fill a gap that exists in leveraging tracing data, aggregating and navigating it in ways that are actionable for operators. Our application provides multiple views of the system and uses spatial and hierarchical navigation using flip zoom to simplify their exploration, while preserving context. Our application can provide a better understanding of the system than existing applications that lack navigability and do not preserve context when switching between different services, layers or views.