About application diagnostics

Introduction

Based on the overall service health, application diagnostics performs overall monitoring and statistics collection on the running states of system resources, including infrastructure, microservices, middleware, API gateways, and links. It provides a metric-based analytics tool to O&M staff.

Application diagnostics provides the following features:

Uses a visualized link architecture diagram to display inter-application call relationships, key metrics, and execution information, indicating the running states of applications in real time. It collects various running data of the applications in application groups and displays the real-time running states of the applications on the O&M dashboard. The O&M staff can use the data for anomaly alerting and analysis, decision-making, and application optimization.

Provides a non-invasive link tracking solution for Java applications created through jar and war packages. It uses probes to collect link running data from applications and reports the data to the link analytics module.

Displays link running data reported by the link tracking module in graphs.

Benefits

Application diagnostics provides various metrics for diagnosing application groups and applications, satisfying the requirements of almost all scenarios. The diagnostics metrics include overall health state, throughput, access success ratio, average response time for 95% access requests, average access latency, network-wide link topology, application state, resource usage, and log.

A visualized link architecture diagram will be automatically generated after the applications access each other, displaying various information including inter-application call relationships, link states, application throughput, success ratio, and 95% response time. If an application is configured with an API gateway, the system also displays its instance call hierarchy through a link tree, helping you learn about link and application request quality and locate middle-office and edge applications.

The intelligent O&M dashboard displays various running data of all applications in a visualized and real-time manner.

Application diagnostics provides a visualized link architecture diagram to display information about applications in the application groups, including inter-application access links as well as the key metrics such as application throughput and success ratio. It displays different metric states in different colors to help you quickly find out the abnormal data.

Application diagnostics cooperates with the microservices features to provide an "alarm-diagnostics-governance" microservices management solution. The solution collects application data, monitors application states and generates alarms, performs comprehensive analytics on data metrics, link architecture diagram, and call links, and then governs the applications based on the analytics results, implementing one-stop application O&M.

Relationship with other cloud services

An application group is an abstract of multiple applications that jointly support a business. You can create application groups to isolate applications logically and perform unified application management. Each application group can contain multiple applications. You can select an existing application group when deploying a container image or software package. Then, the container image or software package runs as an application. You can create multiple instances for an application to ensure high availability.

As a key role in the microservices architecture, the API gateway controls access requests to applications. It is the portal to the microservices system and the only access point to the applications. The API gateway processes load balancing, caching, routing, and access control events of applications.

The system provides call link restoration, call request statistics, link architecture diagram, link structure tree, and application dependency analytics features to help you figure out the performance bottlenecks in the distributed application architecture and improve the microservices development and diagnostics efficiency.

Application diagnostics supports Spring Cloud, Dubbo, and Istio microservices engines that provide various service management features such as service discovery and registration, link tracking, service governance, API gateway, data monitoring, and configuration center, implementing unified monitoring, analytics, operations, maintenance, and management on microservices data.