Monitoring microservices

Microservices are truly distributed systems with a fluid deployment topology. Without sophisticated monitoring in place, operations teams may run into trouble managing large-scale microservices. Traditional monolithic application deployments are limited to a number of known services, instances, machines, and so on. This is easier to manage compared to the large number of microservices instances potentially running across different machines. To add more complication, these services dynamically change their topologies. A centralized logging capability only addresses part of the issue. It is important for operations teams to understand the runtime deployment topology and also the behavior of the systems. This demands more than a centralized logging can offer.

In general application, monitoring is more a collection of metrics, aggregation, and their validation against certain baseline values. If there is a service-level breach, then monitoring tools generate alerts and...