Microservices are a popular architectural style for building applications that are resilient, highly scalable, independently deployable, and able to evolve quickly. But a successful microservices architecture requires a different approach to designing and building applications. A microservices architecture consists of a collection of small, autonomous services. Each service is self-contained and should implement a single business capability within a bounded context.
Each microservice performs a service, such as managing database access, membership services, invoicing functions, etc. However, it is common for a microservice to employ others to complete a task. So, many layers of microservices can contribute to a successful transaction. The services must be tracked, bugs are traced, and the traffic flow is monitored across the infrastructure. In this blog, let’s take a deeper look at how Serverless360 plays a vital role in tracing microservices.
Need for tracing the microservices architecture
The need for observability has increased with the rise of microservices-based cloud applications and their corresponding complexities. Observability is monitoring the behavior of infrastructure at a granular level. It facilitates maximum visibility within the infrastructure and supports the incident management team in maintaining the reliability of the architecture. The microservices architecture has introduced an all-new way to scale an application (cloud) with several independent services, thus facilitating high resiliency, scalability, productivity, and efficiency. There comes the need for distributed tracing to trace the bugs and effectively monitor each independent service.
Distributed tracing systems enable users to track requests through a software system distributed across multiple applications, services, databases, and intermediaries like proxies. It allows for a deeper understanding of what is happening within the software system. These systems produce graphical representations that show the time the request took on each step and list each known step.
Tools available in market
There are a lot of distributed tracing tools in the market to monitor and trace the microservices but choosing the correct tool is critical. Some tools available are Serverless360, Datadog, NewRelic, Dynatrace, etc. Each of the tools has its advantages as well as complexities. Most of the tools focus on the performance monitoring of the business transactions done in the microservices, but it is more important that there must be an end-to-end tracking of the complete flow, which is done by Serverless360.
Why Serverless360 BAM
As many Azure services communicate with each other, in any integration solution, the Serverless360 Business Applications module offers a unique approach to simplifying the distributed modules and microservices that contribute to a single business process function. The tool creates logical business applications that can be managed as a unit, which helps us quickly examine an Azure-based service’s performance.
With Serverless360 BAM, the users get complete visibility of their end-to-end business process flow across their Azure resources. Serverless360 BAM is always the first choice for it performs end-to-end message tracking and captures necessary data on business process flow across Azure resources and hybrid integrations.
The BAM module helps model transactions in business processes and map them to the underlying integration service. It also captures the essential properties in runtime to pinpoint the root cause of a business failure.
The complex integration flows can be easily depicted. The intuitive dashboard makes it easy to analyze the performance, anomalies, and data trends and make informed decisions.
Real-time distributed tracing beyond boundaries
To achieve end-to-end real-time distributed tracing of the message and metadata flowing through the microservices, Serverless360 Business Activity Monitoring can be the best fit. It can track fundamental properties and allow users to locate a transaction by querying for the property value. It also enables dynamic monitoring of transaction exceptions and any violations in the threshold limits set. It is much easier to correlate data flow within the user’s system.
One of the main advantages of the Serverless360 BAM is the ability to visualize the business transactions in graphical form and detailed data.
In a microservice architecture, there would be many services integrated. This graphical view will help us quickly identify any failures or exceptions in any stages and action them accordingly.
Users can set up a business process and add transactions with multiple stages. Each of the stages may execute in any of your business components.
BAM now supports automatic resource identification while tracking transaction instances, revealing the source from which the transaction instance is executed. The source of transaction instance execution is automatically identified, and the respective resource type icon is visible in the Message flow while tracking transaction instances when a transaction instance is triggered using Logic App, Power Automate, or Custom APIs.
An added advantage in BAM is dynamic reprocessing, which is useful when the user wants to reprocess the tracked property values as a header. It also offers a solution by allowing the instances to regenerate the message-id, ensuring that no transaction instances are lost concerning their corresponding endpoints. Multiple transaction instances can also renew their message ids simultaneously by selecting the required transaction instances and reprocessing.
Advanced Monitoring Options
With the microservice architecture, it is essential to ensure all the services are in a healthy state and get notified of any exceptions on the user’s preferred channels. With query monitoring, the users can track the critical queries that impact the performance and overall operation of a business process in a business orchestration. With exception monitoring, BAM allows users to log exceptions and exception codes in the stages of the business transaction. The logged exceptions will be displayed when the user selects the transaction instance. Users will also receive immediate alerts whenever an exception is logged in any transaction.
The BAM dashboard helps visualize the trend of the business processes and understand the businesses by viewing the transactions grouped by tracked properties.
The main advantages of BAM include:
- Simplified usability
- High reliability
- Seamless performance
- Improved security
Conclusion
Thus, Serverless360 BAM helps enhance distributed tracing of the microservice architecture with its out-of-the-box operational and monitoring capabilities. Why not give it a try? For more details, check out Serverless360 BAM.
