By Tom Wilkie, delivered at London Microservices User Group on 2/12/15 The rise of microservice-based applications has had many knock-on effects, not least on the complexity of monitoring your application. Order-of-magnitude increase in the number of moving parts and rate of change of the application require us to reassess traditional monitoring techniques. In this talk we will discuss some different approaches to monitoring, visualising and tracing containerised, microservices-based applications. We’ll present different techniques to some of the emergent problems, and try not to rant too much.

1. Monitoring Microservices
tom@weave.works
@tom_wilkie

3. VisualisationMonitoring Tracing
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4. Monitoring
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5. Traditional 3-tier architecture
Incoming traffic
Load balancers
Application servers
Database & replica

6. Microservice architecture
Public APIWeb UI
NoSQL serversDatabase
Message
Broker
Services

8. Microservices should be
treated like cattle not pets

10. USE Method* - for every
resource, check:
• utilization,
• saturation, and
• errors
RED Method - for every
service, check request:
• rate,
• error (rate), and
• duration (distributions)
are within SLO/A
* http://www.brendangregg.com/usemethod.html
An alternative view

11. Monitoring
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12. Visualisation

14. Weave Scope

15. Connection
Tracking
# cat /proc/net/tcp
# conntrack -E -p tcp

16. Matrix

17. Connection
Tracking
all connections
from
/proc
conntrack

18. Demo time

19. Visualisation

20. Tracing

21. Distributed
Tracing

22. Not a new topic
• Lots of literature
• Existing open source
projects
• e.g. Zipkin, originally from
Twitter

23. • Challenge: detecting
causality between
incoming and outgoing
requests
• Existing solutions
require propagation of
some unique ID
(dapper, zipkin)
• This requires
application-specific
modifications
some service
incoming
request
outgoing
requests
?

24. Can this be done without
application modifications?

25. Demo time

26. Tracing

27. VisualisationMonitoring Tracing
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28. @weaveworks github.com/weaveworks
Questions?
http://weave.works/product/scope
tom@weave.works
@tom_wilkie