A Novel Framework for Evaluating Application Performance in Distributed Systems

This paper proposes an innovative framework for analyzing execution times in distributed systems. This evaluation framework is designed to support both software development and production monitoring by providing valuable insights into how the application’s response time is broken down by operations. In addition, it should also help to spot abnormal behavior. Due to the large popularity of the Spring Framework for enterprise systems and its mature ecosystem, the evaluation framework is designed on top of it, and implicitly functions as a Java application. The evaluation framework integrates seamlessly with the popular metrics collectors, such as Prometheus, and provides the flexibility to export to other data sinks, such as Apache Kafka, enabling the clients to fully customize the flow of metrics through the system. The evaluation framework is purposefully designed to have a very flat learning curve, coupled with minimal CPU and RAM overhead. This means it is inexpensive to integrate into both new and existing projects, as well as to run.