From Silos to Service Topology: Why Netflix Built a Real-Time Service Map

Netflix built a real-time service topology map to help engineers understand dependencies across thousands of microservices and troubleshoot incidents faster.

• •Engineers need unified views of upstream/downstream dependencies, blast radius impact, and root cause identification during incidents, which traditional observability tools cannot provide
• •eBPF network flows capture kernel-level network connectivity for comprehensive coverage regardless of instrumentation
• •IPC metrics and distributed traces add application-layer context showing which specific APIs and endpoints are being called
• •Three independent graphs (network, application, request layers) stored separately enable parallel querying while supporting unified views with sub-second response times
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