Visualizing Anti-Patterns in Microservices at Runtime: A Systematic Mapping Study

Parker, G.; Kim, Samuel; Maruf, Abdullah Al; Černý, Tomáš; Frajták, Karel; Tisnovsky, Pavel; Taibi, Davide

doi:10.1109/access.2023.3236165

Cited by 10 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…The idea of using telemetry to improve the structure of a system can be traced back to several research papers released in recent years [6,7,20], and has a relatively small list of problems that can be identified, which opens up opportunities for further study of this topic [21].…”

Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Telemetry to solve dynamic analysis of a distributed system

Talaver,

Vakaliuk

2024

J. Edge Comp.

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In the modern software development world, implementing distributed solutions has become quite common due to the flexibility it brings to big companies. The downside is that when developing such systems, especially in many teams, global design problems may not be obvious and lead to a slowdown in the development process or even problems with the location of errors or degradation of overall system performance. In addition, the timely reaction to system degradation is complicated by the distributed nature of the architecture; while manually configuring rules for reporting problematic situations can be time-consuming and still incomplete, automatic detection of possible system anomalies will give engineers (especially Software Reliability Engineers) the focus on problems. For this reason, applications that can dynamically analyse the system for problems have great potential. Currently, the topic of using telemetry for system analysis is actively studied and gaining traction, so further research is valuable. The work aims to theoretically and practically prove the possibility of using telemetry to analyse a distributed information system and detect harmful architectural practices and anomalous events. To do this, firstly, a detailed overview of the problems related to the topic and the feasibility of using telemetry is provided; the next section briefly describes the history of the development of monitoring systems and the key points of the latest OpenTelemetry standard, reviews popular application performance monitoring systems, and defines innovative features to be further researched. The main part includes an explanation of the approach used to collect and process telemetry, a reasoning behind the usage of Neo4j as a data storage solution, a practical overview of graph theory algorithms that help in the analysis of the collected data, and a description outlining how the PCA algorithm is employed to detect unusual situations in the whole system instead of individual metrics. The results provide an example of using the software presented with Neo4j Bloom to visualise and analyse the data collected over several hours from the OpenTelemetry Demo test system. The last section contains additional remarks on the results of the study.

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Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Telemetry to solve dynamic analysis of a distributed system

Talaver,

Vakaliuk

2024

J. Edge Comp.

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“…Conventional visual models like UML and SysML are derivatives, but microservices add various aspects to consider, primarily system size. The question is whether the existing visualization techniques used before the microservice architecture are appropriate for the present challenges [3], [12]. Although we can effortlessly apply UML class diagrams to represent the domain in the context of microservice, it is still a matter of concern how to portray service views.…”

Section: A Microservice Visualizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing 2D and Augmented Reality Visualizations for Microservice System Understandability: A Controlled Experiment

Abdelfattah¹,

Černý²,

Taibi³

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Microservice-based systems are often complex to understand, especially when their sizes grow. Abstracted views help practitioners with the system understanding from a certain perspective. Recent advancement in interactive data visualization begs the question of whether established software engineering models to visualize system design remain the most suited approach for the service-oriented design of microservices. Our recent work proposed presenting a 3D visualization for microservices in augmented reality. This paper analyzes whether such an approach brings any benefits to practitioners when dealing with selected architectural questions related to system design quality. For this purpose, we conducted a controlled experiment involving 20 participants investigating their performance in identifying service dependency, service cardinality, and bottlenecks. Results show that the 3D enables novices to perform as well as experts in the detection of service dependencies, especially in large systems, while no differences are reported for the identification of service cardinality and bottlenecks. We recommend industry and researchers to further investigate AR for microservice architectural analysis, especially to ease the onboarding of new developers in microservice projects.

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