JCallGraph: Tracing Microservices in Very Large Scale Container Cloud Platforms

Haifeng Liu, Jinjun Zhang, Huasong Shan, Min Li, Yuan Chen, Xiaofeng He, Xiaowei Li

Abstract: Microservice architecture splits giant and complex enterprise applications into fine-grained microservices, promoting agile development, integration, delivery and deployment. However, monitoring tens of thousands of microservices is extremely challenging, and debugging problems among massive microservices is like looking for a needle in a haystack. We present JCallGraph, a tracing and analytics tool to capture and visualize the microservice invocation relationship of tens of thousands of microservices with millions of containers at JD.com. JCallGraph achieves three main goals for distributed tracing and debugging: online microservices invocation construction within milliseconds, minimal overhead without any significant performance impact on real-production applications, and application-agnostic with zero-intrusion to application. Our evaluation shows that JCallGraph can accurately capture the real-time invocation relationship at massive scale and help developers to efficiently understand interactions among microservices, pinpoint root-cause of problems.