I spend a lot of time working with highly distributed systems that use an SOA / microservice type architecture and increasingly are accessed through clients such as native apps, Cordova app, or JavaScript SPAs and it can be challenging to understand what is going on across multiple servers and devices when faults occur or you need to understand something.
I wanted a tool that was fairly non-invasive, had a highly interactive user interface, and would capture a wide breadth of data and was reasonably priced. There were solutions that did bits of what I wanted (particularly at the high end in terms of price) but nothing that really hit the sweet spot for me particularly in terms of being able to drill through and across data to form a coherent picture.
This sort of thing really is my cup of tea as a developer and so I went off and built it coming at this from two directions:
- When errors occur in the system I want to know everything that was happening around them across devices and servers and to be able to drill into it all and find related items.
- To understand how users are behaving and experiencing the system and to be able to jump off and drill into areas of interest.
I’ve been dogfooding on it for a while now and the first part is pretty much ready to roll and the second part has most of the plumbing in place and is getting expanded out over the next few weeks. It’s tentatively called Microservice Analytics and there are some screenshots below to whet your appetite.
It’s one of those projects that is almost endless in terms of where you might take it (I’ve got a list of enhancements as long as my arm just from my own usage) but at some point I need some feedback and to figure out it its useful to anyone but me and so I’m just starting to issue beta invite codes.
If you’re interested get in touch with a comment below.
