When your company has a few services, it is easy to maintain and manage them. However, as your company grows and more teams add more services, it becomes more difficult to keep track of all the different aspects of an individual service or get a sense of how apps are doing overall. Furthermore, as your services grow and become intertwined together, it is useful to see an overall service mesh of how applications talk to each other (and potentially 3rd party services).
With a service or app tracking database, you can understand how apps are doing at a high level and drill down into an individual instance. With this kind of database, you can automate tracking of metrics in a number of categories. By tracking all of this information, you can perform health checks across apps and provide developers ways to quickly gauge an application's health, see its owner information, and check in on patterns emerging in your organization. These benefits are not limited to engineers, which you will find out throughout the following list of example data to collect.
The metadata of an application provides basic information and links for the service or application. It may include such information as ownership and interaction with other services. This part of the registry is used by a wide variety of individuals looking for basic information about the application.
Health information is the most useful when it's aggregated to a "health score". This allows anyone to get a quick sense of how an application is performing with regards to the organization's standards. This tends to be useful for product owners and management.
This information often feeds into the health checks of the system. It is often used by the developers working on the system to make their lives easier.
You can integrate a lot of this with your chat system via Chat Ops and make it searchable via Consolidated Search.
Opslevel.com provides this service for a monthly fee. See their website for more detail.
[https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon17americas/program/presentation/arthorne](https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/3d912a0e-6273-4ca6-932f-4c00db297d20/arthorne.mp4)
https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon17americas/program/presentation/arthorne
[https://dzone.com/articles/modeling-microservices-at-spotify-with-petter-mari](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XDA044tl8k)
https://dzone.com/articles/modeling-microservices-at-spotify-with-petter-mari