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Read the service graph

This guide shows how to read your service topology and drill into a single service.

Get the full overview

  1. Press N for the Services & Dependencies Camera View, the top-down flattened overview of your whole topology.
  2. Scan for red or burning nodes. A node glowing red is unhealthy; a node with a burning texture in its center is on fire. You can hover a node for its tooltip from this top-down view, before you drop into the graph.
  3. Look at black nodes. Black is a phantom, a service that should exist and does not. See Rendering absence.

Check a node's stats

  1. Hover a node to see its tooltip: operations, last activity, connections, throughput, latency (p50/p95/p99), and errors.
  2. Press F6 to copy the tooltip contents to the clipboard.

Drill into a node

  1. Click any node to teleport onto it.
  2. Once you are on the graph, it returns to its organic 3D form, so you can walk the neighborhood around the node you chose.
  3. Read the summary boards on the node's platform for that service's health, errors, and callers. See Readouts and boards.

Choose how you get to a node

Pick whichever path fits what you know.

Board-led: you know the service by name

  1. At the graph root, read the summary boards (Recent Errors, Services, Dependencies).
  2. Find the row for the service you want.
  3. Click the row to travel there.

Fire-led: you can see it is on fire

  1. Look for a visibly red or burning node in the graph.
  2. Click it to go straight there.

Verification: you are standing on the node's platform, and the summary boards around you show that service's health, errors, and callers.