External services are everywhere. You can tell your smart speaker goodnight and it will turn off the lights, lock the door, and tuck the dog into bed (still working on that last one). From the APIs connecting your smart home devices to the microservices powering your latest application, it can feel almost magical when everything is working right.
When something goes wrong, though, the facade of magic comes tumbling down and you have to figure out which API call or third party service is causing the issue. If you know where the problem is, you can troubleshoot it with a distributed trace, but what when you’re not sure where to look?
That’s why New Relic is launching a new version of the external services dashboard to help you rapidly identify issues with the APIs and microservices that your applications rely on.
Map view to rapidly identify issues
The first thing you’ll see in external services is the map view. The map view is perfect for a high-level view of all your services.
The previous image shows the map view. Your application’s dependencies, also known as upstream dependencies, are listed on the left. On the right are services that depend on your application, known as downstream services. You can see which services are healthy as well as the throughput and time consumption for each service. You can select a service to see more detailed information on that service.
List view for comparison and sorting
The list view shows your services and is sortable by response time, call count, and error count. You can also see how the response time, throughput, and error rate of your services change compared with yesterday or an hour ago. The change is displayed as a percentage.
New and improved tracing
This new version of external services is powered by distributed tracing instead of cross application tracing. Distributed tracing can gather more useful data than cross application tracing from a wider variety of services, helping you quickly understand how your requests traverse your microservice-based applications.
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