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Simplifying Service Dependency With Squadcast's Service Graph

#incidentresponse #incidentmanagement #bestpractices

Originally published on Squadcast.com.

Microservicesare fantastic for agility and innovation, but the trade-off is complex service management and ownership. With hundreds of interconnected services, troubleshooting and Incident Response can become a potential blocker. The traditional siloed approach to service ownership and the increasing deployment makes service management more complex.

In this blog, we’ll learn about theService Graphwithin Squadcast, examine its need, benefits, and how it transforms Incident Management from a practical standpoint.

Challenge At Hand

The escalating adoption of microservices brings two main problems to the forefront.

  • Firstly, the concentration of knowledge within specific teams creates silos, hindering a holistic understanding of the entire system. Let's be realistic – it's quite a challenge for any engineer to know the ins and outs of the entire system. That’s a significant consideration. 🔄
  • Another major hiccup is the shifting business landscape. Companies are gunning for faster evolution which translates to a constant need for product innovation, adding new features, or even introducing entirely new product lines. Consequently, the frequency of changes has skyrocketed, resulting in code/features being pushed and shipped at a high pace.

Many of our customers often pose a series of questions when faced with managing hundreds of microservices:

Should I be creating these microservices within Squadcast? If I have 100 or 200 microservices, won't it be too many services to handle? How can I effectively manage this multitude of services within Squadcast? How can I determine which service corresponds to which part of my product? And more.👀

Solution: Visualize Your Microservices Web with Service Graphs

Squadcast’s Service Graph acts as an interactive map, automatically constructing service interdependencies based on configurations. This visual representation is crucial for Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) striving for blameless postmortems and transparent Incident Responses.

Service Reliability Management with Squadcast

Service Graph Applications & Common Use Cases

Service graph can be useful in certain scenarios: 

  1. Incident Response Clarity
  2. Instantly pinpoint upstream and downstream services during incidents.
  3. Enhance collaboration with service ownersfor swift issue resolution.
  4. Dynamic System Health Visualization
  5. Quickly grasp incident impact radius.
  6. Identify healthy, attention-required, and under-maintenance services promptly.
  7. Efficient Cross-Collaboration
  8. Streamline communication between service owners for agile Incident Response.
  9. Anticipate blast radius, facilitating quick and comprehensive issue resolution.

In practical scenarios, these use cases showcase how Service Graph becomes a crucial tool for effectiveIncident Managementand heightened awareness of system health.

Understanding Service Graph

To see the status of your service, you’ll first need to add your services in Squadcast. A service constitutes a fundamental element of your infrastructure or application, triggering alerts when necessary. Services are represented as nodes on the Servicegraph. They can also be dependent on other services.

Creating Services in Squadacst: Navigate to Services -> Click on Add New Service. On the next screen, you will be guided through two steps.

  1. Define Service: Name and describe the service, assign an Escalation Policy and Owner, add Tags, then save.
  2. Add Alert Source: Choose integration(s) for alert delivery using search, dropdown, or popular integrations.
  3. Click Done to create your new service.

You can edit or delete the Service, edit a Service’s Escalation Policy, or add Integrations to an existing Service anytime. You can explore our detailed guide on Services here.  

After you’ve added the Services in Squadcast and assigned them the owners, you can navigate to Services -> Graph.

The graph will only show services that have dependencies. Services without dependencies will be listed under "Independent Services" on the right.

* You can zoom in/out, fit to screen, and drag components to customize the view.

  • The graph is automatically generated based on service dependencies you create.
  • Changes to the graph are only saved for the current session.
  • Use the filters on the bottom to focus on services with specific statuses.

For More details refer: Service Overview

Benefits of Using Service Graph

Service Graph brings you some of the most important benefits: 

  • Enhanced Transparency: Get a single, comprehensive view of service topology throughout your interconnected web services.
  • Minimized Incident Downtime: Reduce MTTA (Mean Time To Acknowledge) and MTTR(Mean Time To Resolve), promoting proactive Incident Response through immediate service impact assessment.
  • Holistic System Health Understanding: The auto generated graph helps teams understand the complete impact radius of an incident, allowing them to predict potential impacts on other services.
  • Facilitated Collaboration: Enable seamless communication between service owners, enhancing cross-team collaboration for quicker incident resolution.
  • Effortless Stakeholder Engagement: Provide non-tech stakeholders with a simplified view of service performance, allowing business units and upper management to quickly grasp and assess system impact.
  • Ownership and Dependency Mapping: Service Graph keeps ownership of service intact, emphasizing the importance of knowing who owns each service. Users can define dependencies within services itself.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Squadcast's Service Graph tackles the challenges posed by the intricacies of microservices head-on. Service Graph benefits extend beyond Incident Management, offering a strategic advantage by fostering transparency, collaboration, and a deeper understanding of system health. 

Discover more about Service Graph in our support documentation. Sign up free for Squadcast if you want to try it yourself.🤝 

What you should do now* Schedule a demo with Squadcast to learn about the platform, answer your questions, and evaluate if Squadcast is the right fit for you.

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