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Raglianti_DeRycke_2025_IEEE_VISSOFT.pdf
Conference paper (in proceedings)

Visualizing data access traces in microservices using animated heat treemaps

  • De Rycke, Maxime Namur Digital Institute, University of Namur, Belgium
  • André, Maxime Namur Digital Institute, University of Namur, Belgium
  • Raglianti, Marco ORCID Istituto del software (SI), Facoltà di scienze informatiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
  • Cleve, Anthony Namur Digital Institute, University of Namur, Belgium
  • Lanza, Michele ORCID Istituto del software (SI), Facoltà di scienze informatiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
  • 2025
Published in:
  • IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT). - 2025, p. 74-78
Microservices
Dynamic traces
Data access
Visualization
Animated heat treemap
English Microservices have become a prevalent architectural style over the past decade, emphasizing the modular and dynamic nature of heterogeneous and distributed units that communicate with each other. Moreover, they promote polyglot persistence, meaning that each microservice is responsible for managing its own database(s), often with heterogeneous technologies. One of the downsides is the increase of the number and diversity of data access endpoints and exchanges. Additionally, the decomposition introduces implicit dependencies that affect code and data understanding and co-evolution. Maintaining a comprehensive high-level view of this kind of architecture is challenging, yet essential for software evolution tasks. Previous works have already proposed holistic representations and visualizations of data access in microservices. However, these are mainly based on structural and fixed snapshots, neglecting the dynamic perspective. We present an approach to enhance static visualizations. First, we record data-access-centered execution traces in microservices architectures through a static analysis-based refinement of dynamic instrumentation. Then, we replay scenarios over an existing static treemap, animating the sequence of data accesses and highlighting hotspots in the codebase through time. Our contribution, the animated heat treemap, helps developers to understand how data management operates inside microservices. We validated our approach on Overleaf, a popular online collaborative LATEX authoring platform, with a real-world scenario. We discuss the results obtained and provide insights and reflections.
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Language
  • English
Classification
Computer science and technology
License
Rights reserved
Open access status
green
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Persistent URL
https://n2t.net/ark:/12658/srd1333732
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