Visualizing data access traces in microservices using animated heat treemaps
Additional information
Authors
De Rycke M.,
André M.,
Raglianti M.,
Cleve A.,
Lanza M.
Type
Article in conference proceedings
Year
2025
Language
English
Abstract
Microservices have become a prevalent architectural style over the past decade, emphasizing the modular and dynamic nature of heterogeneous and distributed units that communicate with each other. Moreover, they promote polyglot persistence, meaning that each microservice is responsible for managing its own database(s), often with heterogeneous technologies. One of the downsides is the increase of the number and diversity of data access endpoints and exchanges. Additionally, the decomposition introduces implicit dependencies that affect code and data understanding and co-evolution. Maintaining a comprehensive high-level view of this kind of architecture is challenging, yet essential for software evolution tasks. Previous works have already proposed holistic representations and visualizations of data access in microservices. However, these are mainly based on structural and fixed snapshots, neglecting the dynamic perspective. We present an approach to enhance static visualizations. First, we record data-access-centered execution traces in microservices architectures through a static analysis-based refinement of dynamic instrumentation. Then, we replay scenarios over an existing static treemap, animating the sequence of data accesses and highlighting hotspots in the codebase through time. Our contribution, the animated heat treemap, helps developers to understand how data management operates inside microservices. We validated our approach on Overleaf, a popular online collaborative LATEX authoring platform, with a real-world scenario. We discuss the results obtained and provide insights and reflections.
Keywords
Microservices, Dynamic traces, Data access, Visualization, Animated heat treemap
Conference proceedings
IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT)
Diffusion
License
Rights reserved
Visibility
Public
Status open access
Green
