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BitDive HeatMap Dashboard

The BitDive HeatMap provides a real-time, method-level performance view across your entire distributed system. This visual profiler helps you visualize and analyze the performance characteristics of your system, displaying fine-grained metrics like latency, error rate, and throughput - grouped by application module, service, class, and method.

Color-coded intensity makes it easy to identify outliers: the slower or more error-prone a method is, the hotter (redder) its cell appears.

Heatmap overview with hierarchical services and color-coded cells

Accessing the HeatMap

  1. Open the BitDive dashboard.
  2. Select HeatMap in the left navigation.

This launches an expandable grid-based view of all services, down to the method level.

Heatmap navigation panel highlighted

The HeatMap displays performance metrics in a hierarchical structure:

APPLICATION MODULE
└── MICROSERVICE
└── CLASS
└── METHOD

Each level shows detailed metrics including call counts, response times, success rates, and more.

Click on any row toggle to drill down or collapse the tree. This hierarchy enables quick narrowing from a system-wide view to one problematic method.

Expandable application and service hierarchy in heatmap

Metric Categories

The dashboard tracks several main types of metrics:

  • Incoming HTTP Requests: External API calls to your application
  • Internal REST Calls: Service-to-service communication
  • SQL Queries: Database operations
  • Scheduler Calls: Background task execution
  • Queue Send Operations: Message enqueuing
  • Queue Consumer Processing: Message handling
  • Error Count (Total): Aggregated errors across all operations

Metric groups panel for toggling different metric types

Metric Columns

For each component, the dashboard displays:

ColumnDescription
Call CountNumber of invocations
Avg TimeAverage response time
Success RatePercentage of successful calls
Error CountNumber of failures
Query CountNumber of SQL queries (for database operations)
Exec CountNumber of executions

Reading the HeatMap

Each cell represents a method + metric combination. The dashboard uses color coding to highlight performance characteristics:

  • 🔴 Red: Indicates high response times or potential issues
  • 🟠 Orange: Elevated, but not critical
  • 🟢 Green: Indicates healthy performance

Hovering over a cell shows:

  • Time series chart for the metric
  • Exact metric values
  • Timestamps

This gives immediate insight into latency spikes, traffic bursts, or slow methods.

Hover tooltip showing metric chart for selected method

Method-Level Exploration

Click on any method to open the Performance Explorer:

  • View long-term trends for that method
  • Analyze call frequency and error patterns
  • Access traces or flamegraphs (if enabled)

This is especially useful for isolating regressions introduced by recent deployments or changes.

Detailed method metrics and historical graphs

Time Range & Refresh Settings

You can adjust the visible data window via:

  • Time Range Selector - choose from predefined options like "Last 5m", "Last 30m", or custom durations
  • Auto Refresh Toggle - updates the grid continuously

This allows for both incident triage and retrospective analysis.

Toolbar showing time range selector and auto-refresh toggle

When to Use HeatMap

  • Troubleshoot slow endpoints
  • Compare method performance across environments
  • Identify outliers at the code level
  • Continuously profile production workloads
  • Monitor error clusters by method

Together with Service Map, HeatMap gives teams full-stack visibility from architecture-level to method-level - essential for production-grade application performance monitoring.