One of the most challenging aspects of migrating to a microservice architecture is deciding which pieces of the monolith to break off first into separate services. Architects must understand the business objectives, how the services function and how they will relate to the rest of the whole. Then, the team faces more challenges once services are up and running. Operational complexity increases because each service may have its own languages, toolsets and infrastructure.

To help solve these and other problems that arise when moving to microservices, a new set of commercial monitoring solutions, such as Dynatrace, have emerged on top of existing open source tools like Prometheus. By pulling in data from multiple sources via an API, such monitoring tools can provide a complete view of an application, from its traffic patterns on the network and the database statements it executes, to which container, platform and host a service runs on.

“Once you install Dynatrace, we're monitoring and tracking every single service, process, host, log, and also end user,” said Andreas Grabner, DevOps activist, Dynatrace. “We have a complete live dependency map from your complete environment.”