Skip to main content

Services

Services are the instrumented applications APM v2 monitors. The catalog opens on them - every instrumented service in a single table, with overview widgets above it that summarize request, error, latency, and health trends across the services in view. Switch the sidebar to Databases to see the databases your services query, covered in Databases. From the catalog you filter, sort, compare, and open any service to drill into its telemetry. The APM v2 header also links to Open in Legacy APM, which opens the equivalent location in the legacy APM experience.

Use it to:

  • Spot unhealthy services at a glance: sort by health to surface the services that are critical or warning right now.
  • Focus on what you own: filter by team or environment to see only the services and databases you're responsible for.
  • Compare across entities: rank services by request volume, error rate, or latency to find the busiest or most error-prone.
  • Start any investigation: open an entity to drill into its traces, errors, and dependencies.

The catalog: overview widgets - Service health, Requests, Errors, and Latency - above the entity table in its Health view.

What you need​

Choose which entities to view​

The sidebar switches the catalog between two scopes:

  • Services: instrumented applications. This page covers the Services scope.
  • Databases: database systems your services query. See Databases.

The overview widgets, table columns, and filters adapt to the selected scope.

Overview widgets​

Above the table, four widgets summarize the entities currently in view - Service health, Requests, Errors, and Latency. Each reflects the active filters, environment, and time range.

  • Service health: one hexagon per entity, colored by its current health: critical, warning, healthy, or unmonitored. Hover a hexagon to identify the entity; when there are too many entities or environments to show individually, the widget groups them by environment or by health.
  • Requests: incoming request traffic per entity, as requests per second or a total count.
  • Errors: failed requests per entity, as an error rate, a total count, or errors per second.
  • Latency: response time per entity at the selected percentile (P50-P99) or as an average.

Widget controls​

The Requests, Errors, and Latency widgets share a header row of controls, and the Service health widget offers a subset:

  • Unit: how the metric reads - Requests as Per second or Count, Errors as Rate, Count, or Per second, and Latency as Avg or a percentile (P50-P99, multi-select to overlay several lines).
  • Group by (by): split the series - Requests, Errors, and Latency by Service (Database in the Databases scope), Environment, or Version, and Service health by the same entity option, Environment, Team, or Health. Grouping Service health by Team draws one hexagon per team, with entities that have no owner under No team; if there are more than 500 teams, it falls back to grouping by health.
  • Compare to: overlay a baseline from an earlier period. Choosing the previous period of equal length draws a Compared to line on the chart, so you can spot meaningful changes in requests, errors, and latency; this comparison is available on every overview and drilldown chart.
  • Configure: open the configuration panel to set Chart type (Line, Area, or Bar), Scale (Linear or Logarithmic), Series (the top 5 or top 10 entities), and Time bucket (the aggregation interval, Auto by default). When a widget is configured away from the APM account default, it's flagged with a one-click Reset to defaults.
  • Full view: expand the widget to fill the screen.
  • More actions: Create alert on the metric, View query to see the underlying query, or View in Metric Explorer to continue there.

The Configure panel on a catalog overview widget, with Chart type, Scale, Series, and Time bucket options.

The entity table​

The table lists one row per entity. Two views organize the columns:

  • Health: performance and health columns: requests, errors, latency, and health state.
  • Ownership: attribution columns: team, environments, alerts, cases, and SLO status.

Switch between the List and Map views (top right) to see the entities as a table or as a service map. On very large accounts (more than 20,000 entities), only the List view is available. Select Export to download the current table, and use the star icon to add an entity to your favorites so it sorts to the top.

Select a row's actions menu (the icon) to jump to the entity's Logs or Traces drilldown section, to View on map (the Map view focused on that entity), or - for a service - to Add SLO or Create alert, each opening the matching create flow prefilled for the service.

The catalog entity table in its Ownership view, showing the Signal column's coverage chips alongside SLO status, alerts, and cases.

Columns​

Select Manage columns to add, remove, and reorder columns. Availability depends on the entity type.

ColumnApplies toDescription
NameServices, DatabasesEntity name. Hover the cell to reveal a Copy service name (or Copy database name) button.
Env / EnvironmentsServices, DatabasesEnvironments the entity runs in.
HealthServices, DatabasesCurrent health state.
StatusServices, DatabasesWhether the entity is active or inactive in the selected range.
RequestsServicesIncoming request throughput, with an optional trend sparkline.
Incoming / Internal / Outgoing requestsServicesRequest throughput split by direction.
Error rateServices, DatabasesPercentage of requests returning errors. The numeric column is hidden by default; the Error rate trend sparkline (on by default) carries the rate. Add the numeric column from Manage columns.
Internal / Outgoing error rateServicesError rate split by direction.
Total requests / Total errors / Total failuresServices, DatabasesCumulative counts over the range.
Avg latencyServices, DatabasesAverage response time, with an optional trend sparkline.
P95 latencyServices, Databases95th-percentile response time.
ThroughputServicesRequests processed per second.
Queries / Total queriesDatabasesQuery volume, with an optional trend sparkline.
Last seenServices, DatabasesWhen the entity last reported data.
AlertsServices, DatabasesActive alerts on the entity.
CasesServices, DatabasesOpen cases linked to the entity.
SLO statusServicesPer-tier counts of the service's SLOs as colored badges - OK, Warning, Critical, and Breached. A service with no SLO shows a Create SLO button on hover (requires SLO-edit permission) that opens the create drawer prefilled.
SignalServices, DatabasesCoverage chips for Traces, Profiling, and Infra.
TeamServices, DatabasesThe team that owns the entity, or blank when it has no owner.
DeploymentsServicesDeployment count over the range.

Signal column​

The Signal column shows, as a row of icon chips, which data sources are reporting for each entity. It tracks three signals:

  • Traces: distributed traces from the entity.
  • Profiling: CPU profiles from Continuous Profiling.
  • Infra: infrastructure metrics for the hosts, pods, and containers the entity runs on.

A signal is populated from the data the entity actually sends: its chip is active once that data source starts reporting for the entity - traces from distributed tracing, profiles from Continuous Profiling, and infrastructure metrics from infrastructure monitoring. The column therefore reflects what is reporting now, not what is configured.

Hover an active signal for a short description, then select the chip (or Go to signal) to open it for the entity, filtered to the selected time range - Traces opens the entity's traces, Profiling its profiles, and Infra its infrastructure.

When a signal isn't sending, its chip is dimmed. Hover it to see why and how to fix it - for example, No trace data from this service yet. Set up Distributed Tracing for this service to see traces here. - with a Learn more link to the setup guide. Profiling points to Continuous Profiling and Infra to infrastructure monitoring.

Health state​

APM derives each entity's health from its monitoring policies - apdex, cases, error rate, latency, log errors, and SLOs. The health tooltip lists which policies are breached, evaluated against the last point in the selected time range.

Map view​

Select Map (top right) to replace the entity table with a system-wide, force-directed graph of every entity in view and the calls between them. Each node is a service or dependency, sized by its request volume; each edge is an observed call, with thickness reflecting call volume and color reflecting errors on the connection. Service nodes carry a health indicator (critical, warning, healthy, or unmonitored), and databases, messaging systems, and object storage appear as their own node types. Select List to switch back. Choosing View on map from a row's actions menu (or an Overview hexagon) opens this view focused on that entity; if the entity has no traced activity in the selected range, the map notes that it isn't on the map.

This whole-system map is not the same as a single entity's Service Map drilldown tab, which graphs only that one entity's upstream and downstream dependencies.

The catalog Map view: a system-wide, force-directed graph of every service and its dependencies, with a node tooltip showing requests, errors, and average latency.

Read a node or edge​

Hover a node to see its Requests, Errors (count and rate), and Avg latency. Hover an edge to see the same metrics for that specific call, plus P99 latency. Select a service or database node to open its drilldown. The sidebar filters, search, environment, and time range all scope the map: matching nodes stay lit while non-matching ones dim, so you keep the surrounding topology in view.

Graph controls​

A toolbar provides zoom in, zoom out, fit view, toggle minimap, toggle edge labels, export PNG, and export JSON. Pan the canvas and drag nodes to rearrange them, and hold Cmd/Ctrl and scroll to zoom; a minimap tracks your position in a large graph. When no dependencies exist for the range, the map shows No dependencies found for the selected time range.

Search and filter​

  • Search by entity name to narrow the table.
  • Filters in the sidebar scope the catalog, presented as a searchable field list you can expand or collapse. Available filters depend on the entity type: environment, team, and health for both scopes, language for services, and DB system for databases. Filtering by environment shows only the entities present in that environment. The Team filter narrows the catalog to the entities a team owns (in either scope); entities with no recorded owner appear under No team.

Compare to a previous period​

Select Compare to to measure current performance against an earlier period. Choose the previous consecutive period (the equal-length window immediately before the selected range), 1, 2, or 7 days ago, or a custom timeframe. The control then reads Compared to period; select No comparison to clear it.

Turning on comparison changes both the widgets and the table:

  • On each chart, the comparison period is overlaid as a dashed, muted line, time-shifted to align with the current range - so you read the current period (solid) against the earlier one (dashed) at the same points in time. Hovering a point shows both the current and compared values.
  • Next to each metric, in the widgets and in the table rows, a delta shows the change against the compared period, colored by whether it's an improvement or a regression.

Saved views​

The catalog opens in tabs, and each tab is a view. A view captures the entity scope, the sidebar filters, the visible columns and their column mode (Health or Ownership), and any active comparison - so you can keep a purpose-built cut of the catalog and return to it in one click.

The catalog's view tabs with All views and Save view, and a tab's actions menu - Save as, Edit, Rename, and Duplicate.

  • Add view (the +) opens a new tab; Save view saves the current tab's configuration.
  • Each tab's actions menu (the icon) offers Save as to branch the view into a separate one, plus Edit, Rename, and Duplicate.
  • A view with pending changes shows an unsaved changes indicator until you save it.
  • You can open up to a set number of views at once; close a tab to open another.

When you save a view, the Save view panel asks for a view name, an optional folder to organize it under (or create a new one), and an access policy that controls who can view and edit it - for example, Private, where only you can.

A view's configuration is reflected in the page URL, so you can share it by copying the URL.

Annotations​

Chart settings control the annotations overlaid on the overview widgets - deployments, alerts, feature flags, campaigns, and configuration changes. See Annotations.

When the catalog is empty​

If no entity reports data, APM shows a setup screen instead of the table. Enable span metrics and instrument your services to populate the catalog. See the APM onboarding tutorial.

Ask Olly​

Select Ask Olly in the APM v2 header, or press Cmd+I / Ctrl+I, to open the Olly drawer scoped to the catalog you're viewing - the entities in view, your filters, and the selected time range - so you can ask what's unhealthy or what changed without describing your view first.

Next steps​

Explore the databases your services query in Databases.

Last updated on