Service management in Observe APM provides powerful tools to visualize, monitor, and understand your system’s architecture and performance. It automatically discovers microservices and databases from your OpenTelemetry data, offering insights into their health and relationships.

Service catalog

The Service Catalog is a comprehensive list of all services and databases detected in your environment. For each service, it displays critical RED metrics (Request rate, Errors, and Duration), helping you quickly identify which services may require attention. This view acts as your central hub for exploring the health and activity of your system.

Service map

The Service Map visually represents the communication relationships between services and databases, showing how traffic flows through your system. It overlays RED metrics on both services and the connections (edges) between them, making it easy to identify bottlenecks, errors, or latency issues within dependencies.

These features are designed to streamline debugging, performance optimization, and overall service management by providing a clear, data-driven view of your architecture in real-time.

Services and edges show up on the service map if they have reported data in the last 7 days.

OpenTelemetry data used for service management

APM service management uses the data and relationships in the Span dataset to discover microservices and databases in your service.

Service management capability	Underlying OpenTelemetry data
Service naming	`service.name` in the span’s resource attributes
Service catalog filtering	`service.namespace`, and `deployment.environment` or `deployment.environment.name` in the span's resource attributes
Service RED metrics	Spans of kind `SERVER`
Service-to-service edges	Parent/child spans with different `service.name` resource attributes
Service-to-database edges	Child spans of kind `CLIENT` with `db.*` attributes
Database naming	`db.*` attributes