How to monitor Microservices?

Microservices are being used every where and for good reasons. They do provide you with many benefits especially improved focus and cutting the time to market. Microservices do bring complexities too. Monitoring microservices is complex because of simply the number of them. Monitoring a user transaction requires monitoring many microservices. Correlating the data from them to identify the root cause manually is a nightmare especially in a complex environment with 100s or 1000s of microservices. This post is not about the pros and cons of microservices but is about how to monitor them easily using Applicare.

We are using an example of two Springboot java microservices – Users and Departments – a user belongs to a department. Every time we go and look up a user using Users microservice it makes a call to Departments microservice to get the department details. I would use Applicare service flow to demonstrate the architecture of our sample.

 

To  enable monitoring on each microservice all we need to do is to add Applicare agent arguments to the start of those microservices along with making Applicare agent binaries available at runtime. We will cover building Docker image of microservice with Applicare agent pre deployed  and running that image in Kubernetes environment in a future blog post. It is super easy.

Once these Users and Departments microservices are started with Applicare agent, they connect and start reporting data to Applicare controller. Once you login into an Applicare controller and download single agent, it includes information about the controller to report the data back. This controller can be on prem, in cloud  or our from SAAS offering.

You get details on infra performance

 

along with cumulative performance of each microservice and performance of each instance.


 

Applicare automatically ties the data together when Users microservice makes a call to Departments microservice for looking up the user’s department details.

 

No more struggling with monitoring of microservices and correlating the data. With Applicare you see complete user transaction details that may span across multiple microservices.

Getting started with Applicare is easy. Simply register to get access to free on prem or in cloud Applicare controller. Remember single agent is downloaded from the controller and deployed in your environment.

Have fun with microservices monitoring and instantly finding root cause 🙂