Dynatrace Cheat Sheet: Microservices and SOA

With “microSOAvices” environments, it seems like everything is different—software development methodologies, continuous deployments, and more. Another difference—one that’s often overlooked—is the importance of application performance monitoring in microSOAvices . This blog post explains how APM with Dynatrace fits into the overall microSOAvices picture (spoiler alert: it’s all about zero-administration).

Complexity for the win? Nah!

The price you pay for the independence offered by microSOAvices is increased complexity between your components. Individual components are no longer held within a safe monolithic shelter. They are now free to evolve, enabling faster deployments and improvements of the overall system.
Dynatrace smartscape technology makes this situation more manageable by automatically recognizing new hosts, processes, and related services in real-time. The addition of new services, splitting of existing services, and removal of services from your environment are all detected automatically. So visibility into the current state of your environment is always at your fingertips.
By monitoring the processes and network traffic between the components of your environment you can easily see the complete picture—a picture which in the past could only have been visualized using a tool like MS Project.

Rapidly scaled environments

MicroSOAvices allow for easy up- and down-scaling of your environment, cloud computing even allows for easy instantiation of entire datacenters with a single mouse click. With Dynatrace monitoring you can easily see which of your services are under heavy load and then selectively fire up additional instances as required.
To see an overview of all service instances that are up and running on each specific host or datacenter in your environment, just select the corresponding smartscape node. Dynatrace takes care of the rest, presenting you with all the data you you could ever ask for.

Distributed systems equal distributed errors?

Locating certain errors may be easier with microSOAvices, but redundant deployments, virtual and physical networks, and permanent up- and down-scaling of environments makes it hard to find the sources of many problems.
Dynatrace’s root cause analysis features connect the dots between your infrastructure, your hosts, and your services, showing you the exact cause of most errors. Possibly you have a problem with a single instance of a redundantly deployed service across 5 hosts, or maybe you have a failing network connection to a remote mirror. Dynatrace automatically discovers and shows you such problems, saving you the time of tracking down the root cause of performance issues.

Providing content internally today, via a 3rd party tomorrow (or vice versa)

Building up an application environment of standalone services doesn’t simply allow for easy refactoring—it also allows for easy re-implementation (Have you ever opted for a technology and later realized you made a mistake?) and even outsourcing of services.

We’re living in an age of “you-name-it as-a-service.” That input-to-output data-crunching service you’re developing may not hold up too well against that shiny new cloud-based solution that provides essentially the same service. It’s not that your service is bad, but maintenance is a pain and performance sucks. Plus the cloud option seems like a real bargain once you factor in all the maintenance troubles you need to content.

Dynatrace provides you with a continuous environment overview, showing you which of your services are internal and which are external. Ecommerce applications have been relying on external microSOAvices for years—every payment provider out there offers a microSOAvice of one sort or another.

Maybe many of you have been consuming, or even offering, microSOAvices for a long time, long before the term “microservices” (or any of the term’s ancestors) was even coined. So I don’t need to explain the importance of these APM insights to you—Dynatrace is the tool you’ve been waiting for.

The right tool for the job

We’re working hard on providing the best solution for monitoring microservices. If you’re facing any of the challenges I’ve mentioned, give Dynatrace a try. We offer a free, fully-featured trial period. No credit card required. No bullsh!t and no hot air. Give us a try and have a look at the view Dynatrace can provide into your environment.