Platform

Prevent microservices sprawl with vFunction

Without real time architectural visibility, clear standards, principles and oversight, microservices can spiral out of control. vFunction empowers teams to visualize their distributed architecture, identify complex flows and duplicate functionality, and establish self-governance by setting architectural rules.

Automatically find and fix complex flows

vFunction automatically creates sequence flow diagrams, providing a complete view of distributed application flows and quickly exposing inefficiencies due to complexity. By mapping service dependencies and API calls, vFunction produces up-to-date architectural documentation, highlighting circular or multi-hop flows that impact resiliency and performance. As a system of record for live architectures, vFunction enables teams to rapidly pinpoint issues, significantly reducing MTTR.

Visualize and automatically document distributed architecture

In fast-paced organizations, traditional architecture diagrams quickly become obsolete. vFunction delivers real-time visualizations of your microservices environment by continuously capturing changes, providing an up-to-date view of your entire system.

Understand complex dependencies
Monitor changes and accurately represent your microservices architecture
Manage your distributed environment effectively

Enable microservices governance

vFunction’s architecture governance helps teams control sprawl and govern data access and connections by setting rules for individual services or service groups. When violations occur, actionable ‘to-do’s’ guide teams to resolve issues. Helpful guardrails ensure microservices evolve as planned and support data access principles, enabling fast and secure development without compromising architectural integrity or escalating complexity. Additionally, the system is able to identify services that rely on similar resources and API calls to recommend merging them in order to simplify the system.

Manage architectural drift in microservices

When microservices deviate from their intended configuration, architectural drift occurs, often going undetected until it causes incidents or outages.

vFunction establishes a baseline architecture, mapping and monitoring all dependencies between services and resources in distributed systems. It tracks architectural events in real-time, provides alerts when deviations occur, and offers guidance to remediate issues before they escalate.

Examples of architectural events identified by vFunction

New service added

Each new service introduces additional overhead that can slow development velocity. Companies adopting microservices risk creating too many services, leading to inefficiency and complexity.

Multi-hop trace

A request may pass through multiple services to complete a task. This event alerts users when a trace involves an excessive number of hops, introducing latency and inefficiencies that increase the likelihood of system failures or bottlenecks.

Circular traces

Circular traces are when services call each other in a loop. These circular dependencies can lead to performance issues, potential infinite loops, and hard-to-maintain code while impacting the system’s stability and scalability.

How does architectural observability (AO) differ from APM tools?

AO complements APM tools. While both leverage OpenTelemetry data, architectural observability uses only OpenTelemetry tracing date and applies data science to obtain a deeper understanding of the architecture. The fundamental difference is that AO focuses on architectural drift - a concept that does not exist in APM tools. It establishes an architectural baseline and measures how it changes from release to release. It focuses on the quality of the architecture, applying policies to it, and identifying specific architectural complexity issues that are the root cause of performance issues that may be identified by APM tools.

Get guided support with prioritized to-do’s

In vFunction, “to-do’s” are tasks triggered by architectural events and rule violations. This action-oriented approach transforms architectural observability into a powerful, results-driven capability. vFunction goes beyond simple alerts or visualizations. It pinpoints what needs fixing and tracks subsequent releases to verify issue resolution, creating a closed-loop system that continuously validates and enhances resiliency.

“When application architectures become too complex, resiliency, security, performance, and developer efficiency suffer. vFunction is helping enterprises gain a deep understanding of their software architecture and improve system governance, which can enable software engineers to work faster and maintain healthy microservices."

Jim Mercer

Program Vice President at IDC

Resources

distributed architecture
Blog
What is distributed architecture? Know the types and key elements.
Read More
distributed application
Blog
Distributed applications: Exploring the challenges and benefits
Read More
Overview of Microservices Architecture & Design
Guide
Microservices Architecture and Design: A Complete Overview
Read More

Get started with vFunction

Take control of your microservices, macroservices, or distributed monoliths with vFunction’s AI-driven architectural observability platform.