Service Graph

OverviewHow-to

Service graph provides a real time visual overview of how your services communicate with each other. It reads distributed traces and identifies which services call downstream services, how many requests flow between them, and how healthy those interactions are.

Note

Service Graph is an Enterprise-only feature.

Key points:

It helps you understand system behaviour at a glance.
It highlights unusual behaviour so that you can quickly decide where to investigate next using Logs, Metrics, or Traces.
It is not intended for detailed debugging.
It helps you see the overall topology and identify the services that need closer attention.

Service graph focuses on recent activity. When services are inactive for a period of time, they are removed from the graph to prevent unbounded growth and to keep the view relevant.

Where to find this

Sign in to OpenObserve.
Select Traces in the left navigation panel.
The Service graph icon that appears at the top-left corner of the page.

The topology loads automatically when recent trace activity is available. If there is no trace activity, the section displays a message indicating that no service graph data is available.

What service graph displays

Service graph displays the services in your system and the communication observed between them.

Services

Each service represents an application component discovered from distributed traces. The view displays:

The service name
A summary of recent requests
A colour that reflects the recent error behaviour

Colours

Colours indicate the health of each service.

Green shows healthy behaviour
Yellow and orange show increased errors
Red shows repeated failures

Edges

Edges represent calls from one service to another. They indicate downstream communication and help you identify where issues may originate.

Topology behaviour

Service graph displays only recent activity. When a service produces no trace data for a set duration, it is removed from the topology. This design focuses attention on the active state of your system.

Data source

Service graph uses distributed traces as the single data source.
OpenObserve matches client spans and server spans belonging to the same request. This allows the system to identify service relationships, request patterns, and error behaviour.

Service graph does not use logs or metrics directly.

Main controls

Stream selector

Select a trace stream to build the topology from. You can choose a single stream or combine all streams.

Search services

Enter a service name to filter the view. The graph focuses on the selected service and the services connected to it.

Refresh controls

Use manual refresh or enable automatic refresh. Auto refresh supports intervals between five seconds and three hundred seconds.

View mode

Choose between Tree view and Graph view. Both views show the same information using different layouts.

Layout options

Tree view supports horizontal, vertical, and radial layouts.
Graph view supports force directed and circular layouts.

Tree view

Tree view arranges services in a structured hierarchy. It is useful when you want to follow traffic from entrypoint services to downstream dependencies.

Graph view

Graph view arranges services as a network. It uses a physics based simulation to maintain stable spacing between services. Force directed layouts group related services together. Circular layouts arrange services around a circle.

Interaction

You can drag services to reposition them. You can zoom and pan to explore specific areas. Hovering over a service displays a summary of request and error behaviour. Filters and layouts can be combined to focus on specific sections of the topology.

Filter the graph by service

Enter a service name in the Search services field.
Review the focused view of the selected service.

Change the view type

Select Tree view or Graph view.
Select a layout.

Investigate an issue

In the Service graph, identify any services with warning or error colours.
Follow the edges to determine which downstream services may be affected.
Note the service name.
Switch to Logs, Metrics, or Traces and filter by that service for further analysis.