Group services in the service map

Learn how to group instrumented and inferred services in the Splunk APM service map.

Attention:

Alpha features described in this document are provided by Splunk to you "as is" without any warranties, maintenance and support, or service-level commitments. Splunk makes this alpha feature available in its sole discretion and may discontinue it at any time. These documents are not yet publicly available and we ask that you keep such information confidential. Use of alpha features is subject to the Splunk Pre-Release Agreement for Hosted Services.

Use the following links to navigate between the pages in this alpha release:
Note:

This feature is only available in the constellation view of the service map.

To group services by a custom indexed span tag, you must first Add context to spans with span tags in Splunk APM and then Index span tags to create Troubleshooting MetricSets. You can group services by the service.namespace span tag, which is an OpenTelemetry convention. For more information, see Service in the OpenTelemetry documentation.

In the service map, use the Group by drop-down menu to group instrumented services that share the same built-in or custom indexed span tag key.

Service groups enable you to create conceptual groupings of related services. Use service groups to monitor, aggregate, and compare the performance of services that share an indexed span tag key.

For example, you can create a checkout-related service group to monitor the performance of checkout-related services and understand how they affect each other. The service group can help you understand relationships and dependencies between services, such as whether downstream service groups affect upstream service groups.

On the service group view, each circle represents a service group and displays the number of services in the group. The N/A group includes inferred services and instrumented services that do not have the specified indexed span tag key. If a group is not selected, the panel on the right displays the top 5 highest request, error, and latency (RED) metric values reported by service groups.

The following table describes the actions that you can perform on the service group view.
ActionResult
Select a service group once.

Update the panel on the right to display the aggregated requests and errors for all of the services in the group and a list of the services in the group.

In the panel, select a service name to navigate to its service view.

Select a service group twice.

View the services in the group individually on the service map view. The indexed span tag key/value pair is applied as a filter to the service map.

Note: If an N/A service group does not have any inferred or instrumented services that share an indexed span tag key, selecting the service group twice will redirect you to the ungrouped service map view without a filter applied.
Add a filter.

Ungroup the services and filter the service map view.

To filter the service group view, add your filter(s) to the service map before you group services. Filtering the service group view may reduce the number of groups shown in the service map.