Service Call Chain Analysis for Microservice Systems

Service Call Chain Analysis for Microservice Systems

Industrial practitioners widely adopt the microservice architecture to build applications. An application with microservice architecture can be composed of a set of individual services. Although microservice can improve the scalability of a system by isolating services, the complexity and difficulty of defect detection and analysis grow. High verification cost, a long feedback cycle, and high communication cost pose challenges to the maintenance of microservice systems. To address the problem, we propose a call chain tracing and analysis approach designed for the microservice architecture. To evaluate its effectiveness, we implement our approach as a plugin, namely Cam, to monitor and analyze exceptions by tracing call chains. Currently, Cam is packaged as a maven plugin for applications using Spring Cloud, which is an opensource microservice framework for Java programs. We experiment it with a microservice system to demonstrate its availability. The result shows that Cam can help software engineers understand the workflow of a service call and locate potential defects.