Using Observability to Detect Anti-patterns in Benchmarking Application with OpenTelemetry

The microservices architecture emerged in response to the increasing scale and complexity of modern software systems, enabling continuous scalability and addressing the challenges of complex monolithic codebases. However, the growing complexity of cloud-native applications also increases the risks of failures. Additionally, design decisions in these applications can manifest as anti-patterns, recurring practices that, while seemingly effective, lead to negative consequences and compromise system quality. This study evaluates the effectiveness of observability in detecting anti-patterns in a microservices-based benchmarking application, contributing to the improvement of the system's architecture and performance by utilizing the OpenTelemetry (OTel) framework. A total of three anti-patterns were detected: Chatty Services, Wobbly Service Interactions, and Cyclic Dependency. Our experiments demonstrated that by resolving the detected anti-patterns, the response time decreased by 9.38%, improving the application's performance and consequently enhancing the user experience.