Building a Log Stack Trace Framework for Microservices Architecture a Simulation Study

Microservices architecture (MSA) has become increasingly popular in recent years due to its numerous benefits. Many companies are migrating their monolithic applications to an MSA, where each service operates independently, often with its own persistence layer, and interacts with both internal and external services. These services may also participate in an event-driven architecture, emitting and consuming events. However, as the number of services increases, it becomes more challenging to trace request flows across services for debugging. The sheer volume of logs generated by these systems can make data collection and analysis to identify the root cause resource-intensive and costly. While distributed tracing tools can track service calls, they often fall short in capturing custom logs across multiple services. Traditional logging approaches are inefficient in this context due to the complex interactions between services and limitations in log level configurations. This paper proposes a framework that can be integrated into each service within an MSA to collect log data and create a detailed stack trace of calls across services during events such as errors. This approach would help System Reliability Engineers and developers quickly debug issues and identify root causes. The framework supports structured logging, correlates logs with specific events and services, and enables efficient real-time monitoring of the system.