Observability Practitioners Summit 2018

In this talk, we will present our work on statemaps, a novel systems visualization technique borne of our frustration in trying to debug acute latency outliers in a large-scale production system.  We will demonstrate the power of statemaps in visualizing fine-grained disaggregated trace data from dynamic facilities like DTrace, and show how statemaps have allowed us to more quickly identify bottlenecks in production.  We will describe some of the recent advances we have made to statemaps to allow for distributed systems to be more readily visualized, and close with the many open problems we see in distributed systems visualization.