Challenge
In distributed cloud environments, application flows pass through multiple services and cloud entities which are often siloed from each other. You might not be aware of the dependencies and impact your seemingly independent microservice has on other downstream parts of a flow. In fact, you might not even always have access to all the different components. This can slow down every part of the development process, from writing the code, to testing it, integrating it, and finally to using it.
How Helios can help your team
Helios is a developer platform that provides actionable insight into your end-to-end application flows by adapting OpenTelemetry’s context propagation framework to connect the dots. It provides a single source of truth for how data flows through your entire application, in any environment. Using distributed tracing, Helios gives you the right data, with the right context, at the right time, so you understand the dependencies between the different components in your application.
With Helios you can:
- Get E2E visibility, with state-of-the-art visualization, into your system across microservices, serverless functions, databases, and 3rd party APIs, enabling you to quickly identify, reproduce and resolve issues
- See distributed tracing information in full context, including payloads (e.g., HTTP request/response bodies, message queues content, DB queries and results, etc.), headers, and all span attributes
- Leverage actionable insights when you need them: as early as in your local and integration environments, all the way to production
- Integrate with your existing ecosystem – logs, tests, error monitoring, etc. – to get relevant data at the right time and with the right context
Example scenario
The above trace shows an API call for making a deposit between accounts in a demo financial application. The API gateway receives the requests, validates that the user indeed exists, and creates an asynchronous job, using a Kafka broker, to perform the actual transaction of depositing $0.30 using Stripe. The API call to Stripe, however, fails due to a minimal amount threshold of the API.
See the live trace visualization in the Helios Sandbox.
