Application perspectives

Overview

With application perspectives, you can tailor your view of an application and capture the type of semantics and information you need to optimize the applications and services you are responsible for. An application perspective represents a set of services and endpoints that share a common context and use tags for declaration.

Instead of monitoring everything at the same time, you can focus on specific applications, microservices, or business domains that matter to your team. This approach helps you organize your monitoring data according to your team structure, business domains, or technical architecture.

Key features

Application perspectives include the following key features:

• Tag-based grouping of services: Define perspectives by using flexible tag queries.
• Simple and advanced modes: Use a wizard for common scenarios or use advanced configuration for complex setups.
• Real-time monitoring: View metrics and traces with 1-second granularity.
• Customizable dashboards: Create tailored views for each perspective.
• Automatic dependency mapping: Visualize service relationships within your perspective.

Common use cases

See the following example use cases:

Team-based monitoring

Create separate perspectives for front end, backend, data, and platform teams. Each team sees only the services that they own and maintain, reducing noise and improving focus.

Business domain separation

Monitor checkout, inventory, shipping, and payment services independently. Track business-critical flows and measure domain-specific service level agreements (SLAs).

Environment isolation

Separate development, staging, and production monitoring. Prevent confusion and make sure that alerts go to the right teams based on the environment.

Multi-tenant applications

Create perspectives for different customers or tenants. Monitor performance and resource usage per tenant to make sure fair resource allocation.

Where to find it in the UI

You can access application perspectives from the following locations in the UI:

• Create new perspective: Click Applications in the navigation panel, then click Add > New application perspective.
• Perspective list: Click Applications in the navigation panel to see all your perspectives with their health status and key metrics.
• Perspective dashboard: Select a specific perspective to view its dedicated dashboard with real-time metrics, service health, and performance data.
• Services tab: Within a perspective, view all services included in the perspective with their individual metrics.
• Subtraces tab: View all endpoints within the perspective.
• Dependencies tab: Click Dependencies to see the service dependency graph showing how services interact.
• Calls tab: View and analyze individual requests (traces) within the perspective.
• Smart Alerts tab: Configure alerts specific to this perspective.
• Edit perspective: Click the settings icon on a perspective to modify its configuration, filters, and scope.

What problems does this solve?

Application perspectives address the following common monitoring challenges:

• Information overload: Filter out irrelevant services and focus on what matters to your team.
• Unclear ownership: Clearly define which services belong to which teams or domains.
• Cross-team coordination: Share perspectives with stakeholders to improve collaboration.
• Complex architectures: Break down large microservice systems into manageable views.
• Alert fatigue: Configure alerts specific to each perspective.

Related capabilities

The following capabilities work together with application perspectives:

• Smart Alerts - Configure intelligent alerts for your application perspectives.
• Dashboards - Create custom dashboards to visualize perspective metrics.
• Distributed tracing - Trace requests across services within your perspective.
• Service level objectives - Define SLOs for your application perspectives.

Learn more

For detailed configuration options, advanced filtering techniques, and best practices, see Application perspectives documentation.