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Microservices Monitoring - Mastering Distributed System Observability

· 4 min read
Evgenii Frolikov
Evgenii Frolikov
BitDive core team

Microservices Monitoring

Microservices architecture offers businesses flexibility, independent development teams, and the ability to scale individual services. However, the more complex and distributed a system is, the more pressing it becomes to have centralized monitoring and a clear view of how services interact.

Introduction​

In a classic monolithic application, everything is often "at hand," and analyzing a single log or trace can suffice. But in systems with dozens or hundreds of microservices, you can lose sight of the bigger picture. How do you figure out which service is the bottleneck and how it affects other services in the call chain?

This is where BitDive comes in — a monitoring platform capable of correlating data across multiple microservices and building a holistic view of the health of the entire system.

bitDive Features for Microservices Architecture​

1. A Single Monitoring Point​

Your entire microservices "zoo" can easily be connected to a single bitDive server. There's no need to build separate logging or metric infrastructure for each service — just specify the common configuration. All microservices will automatically send data to the unified system.

2. Automatic Distributed Tracing​

bitDive can correlate data about service calls and methods into a single trace, even if those calls are spread across different servers and programming languages. This makes it easy to locate where errors or delays occur.

3. Detailed Metrics​

Each microservice gets its own key metrics:

  • CPU load
  • Memory usage
  • Response time
  • Error rates
  • Request throughput

At the same time, bitDive keeps the larger context, showing how the load is distributed across the entire system.

4. Configuration and Security Management​

  • Easy integration via a Maven dependency and a small YAML/Properties configuration file
  • Encryption of all data and secure SSL certificate exchanges between microservices
  • Built-in Vault support for regular key and certificate rotation

5. Flexible Scalability​

As the number of microservices or workload grows, you simply scale the bitDive infrastructure. Using Docker and Kubernetes, you can dynamically increase capacity without overhauling the monitoring system.

Why Choose bitDive for Microservices​

  • Clear visualization: in one dashboard, you can see how your system's components interact and where bottlenecks occur
  • Easy adoption: no need to spend weeks on integration or custom code; just add one dependency and minimal configuration
  • Built-in security: in distributed systems, it's especially important to ensure data protection at all stages of transmission and storage

Example Use Case​

Imagine you have ten microservices responsible for different aspects of an online store: catalog, cart, payments, user account, etc. When placing an order, something goes wrong — the system responds slowly or sometimes fails with an error.

With bitDive, you can:

  1. Check the aggregated summary and see that the error rate (HTTP 500) increased in the "basket-service"
  2. Dive into the "basket-service" metrics to discover that a specific controller's response time has spiked
  3. Trace the call chain: "basket-service" → "payment-service" → "notification-service." Identify the stage with the longest delay
  4. Quickly see the parameters that pass through each service to pinpoint whether the problem lies in the request format or high load on a particular method

This way, instead of painstakingly sifting through logs and guessing, you get a clear picture of how services interact and the precise point of failure needing attention.

Conclusion​

Monitoring microservices is a challenge that can be simplified by using a specialized system. bitDive provides developers and DevOps engineers with a single tool for deep analysis of distributed systems. Timely issue detection, efficient incident investigation, and failure prevention become much more attainable with our solution.

Learn more about Application Monitoring.
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