It’s now easier to create and manage inferred services in Cloud Observability.
Inferred services are external services, libraries, or dependencies (like a database or a third-party API) that aren’t instrumented with traces. Because they’re not sending span data, they won’t display on a dependency map and become “lost.” Services making requests to them appear to be the end of the chain, giving you an incomplete picture of your system’s topology. You might be missing where an actual issue is.
You can remove these blind spots using inferred service rules. These rules rely on span attributes to define an inferred service. The map examines the attributes of every leaf span (spans not connected to another instrumented service). When there’s a match, the map recognizes it as an inferred service, displaying it as a child node to the instrumented span. It also provides error counts, span counts, and average latencies for these inferred services.
Improvements include the ability to:
- Create and manage separate, easy to understand rules for each type of inferred service in your system.
- Display separate nodes for each value of the attribute used to denote an inferred service.
- Preview how the inferred service will display in a dependency map.
Updated Oct 4, 2023