eCommerce Observability in Practice

This is a repo demonstrating applying observability principals to an eCommerce app.

In this hypothetical scenario, we've got a Spree website, that a team has started adding microservices to. In it's current state, the application is broken.

We'll take that broken application, instrument it with Datadog, and then deploy a fix. After deploying a fix, we'll look into Datadog to ensure our deploy worked, and that our systems are actually functioning properly.

Structure of the repository

This repository is used to build the Docker images to run the application in the different states. The folders that build each of the images are the following:

• ads-service- The advertisement microservice with a couple of injected sleeps.
• ads-service-fixed- The advertisement microservice with the sleeps removed.
• ads-service-errors- The advertisement microservice that will return 500 errors on the /ads endpoint
• ads-service-versions- The advertisement microservice on several versions showcasing the deployment functionality
• discounts-service- The discounts microservice with an N+1 query and a couple of sleeps.
• discounts-service-fixed- The discounts microservice with the N+1 query fixed and the sleeps removed.
• store-frontend-broken-no-instrumentation- The Spree application in a broken state and with no instrumentation. This is the initial scenario.
• store-frontend-broken-instrumented- The Spree application in a broken state but instrumented with Datadog APM. This is the second scenario.
• store-frontend-instrumented-fixed- The Spree application instrumented with Datadog APM and fixed. This is the final scenario.
• traffic-replay- Looping replay of live traffic to send requests to frontend (see Creating Example Traffic for details)

Feel free to follow along with the scenario, or to run the application locally.

Building the docker images

Follow the specific guide for building the images

Deploying the application

The deploy folder contains the different tested ways in which this application can be deployed.

Enabling Real User Monitoring (RUM)

Real User Monitoring is enabled for the docker-compose-fixed-instrumented.yml docker compose and the Kubernetes frontend.yaml deployment.

To enable it, you'll need to log into Datadog, navigate to RUM Applications, and create a new application.

Once created, you'll get a piece of Javascript with an applicationId and a clientToken.

Pass these environment variables to docker-compose:

$ DD_API_KEY=<YOUR_API_KEY> DD_CLIENT_TOKEN=<CLIENT_TOKEN> DD_APPLICATION_ID=<APPLICATION_ID> POSTGRES_USER=<POSTGRES_USER> POSTGRES_PASSWORD=<POSTGRES_PASSWORD> POSTGRES_HOST="db" docker-compose -f docker-compose-fixed-instrumented.yml up

Or uncomment the following lines in the frontend.yaml if in Kubernetes, adding your applicationID and your clientToken:

# Enable RUM
# - name: DD_CLIENT_TOKEN
#   value: <your_client_token>
# - name: DD_APPLICATION_ID
#   value: <your_application_id>

After the site comes up, you should be able to navigate around, and then see your Real User Monitoring traffic show up.

Creating Example Traffic To Your Site

The scenario uses GoReplay to spin up traffic our own (dysfunctional) stores, and then diagnose and fix them with replayed live traffic.

This way, we don't have to manually click around the site to see all the places where our site is broken.

Containerized replay

Building and running manually

Example traffic can be perpetually sent via the traffic-replay container. To build and run it via Docker and connect it to your running cluster in docker-compose (by default the docker-compose_default network is created).

cd traffic-replay
docker build -t traffic-replay .
docker run -i -t --net=docker-compose_default --rm traffic-replay

By default this container will send traffic to the host http://frontend:3000 but can be customized via environment variables on the command line or in the below example via Docker Compose. This facilitates the use of load balancers or breaking apart the application.

environment:
  - FRONTEND_HOST=loadbalancer.example.com
  - FRONTEND_PORT=80

Running via Docker Compose

We automatically build new traffic-replay containers on every release and you can spin up the traffic-replay container with your Docker Compose cluster by adding the config as an override via the example below.

POSTGRES_USER=postgres POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres docker-compose -f deploy/docker-compose/docker-compose-broken-instrumented.yml -f deploy/docker-compose/docker-compose-traffic-replay.yml up

Any of the other docker compose configurations can work with this traffic container just by adding another -f deploy/docker-compose/docker-compose-traffic-replay.yml to the compose command.

Viewing Our Broken Services in Datadog

Once we've spun up our site, and ship traffic with gor, we can then view the health of the systems we've deployed. But first, let's see the structure of our services by visiting the Service Map.

Here, we can see we've got a store-frontend service, that appears to connect to SQLite as its datastore. Downstream, we've got a discounts-service, along with an advertisements-service, both of which connect to the same PostgreSQL server.

With this architecture in mind, we can then head over to the Services page, and see where the errors might be coming from. Is it one of the new microservices?

Looking at the services list, we can sort by either latency, or errors. Looking at all our services, it appears only the store-frontend has errors, with an error rate of ~5%.

By clicking on the store-frontend, we can then drill further and see which endpoints are causing trouble. It seems like it's more than one:

We could click one level down and view one of the endpoints that's generating a trace. We can also head over to the Traces page, and sort by error traces:

With this, we've got a line number that appears to be generating our errors. Checking across multiple traces, we can see the same behavior. It looks like the new advertisement call was pushed to the wrong file.

Finding a Bottleneck

Once we've applied the fix for the wrong file, we still see slow behavior. We can drill down into a service and see where the bottleneck is by sorting via latency on the Services Page:

There are a couple of sleeps in both the discounts service and the advertisments service.

Removing the lines that contains:

time.sleep(2.5)

will fix the performance issue.

The code with the leftover sleeps lives in discounts-service and ads-service, and the fixed versions live in discounts-service-fixed and ads-service-fixed.

Finding an N+1 Query

In the discounts-service, there is an N+1 query:

The problem is a lazy lookup on a relational database.

By changing the line:

discounts = Discount.query.all()

To the following:

discounts = Discount.query.options(joinedload('*')).all()

We eager load the discount_type relation on the discount, and can grab all information without multiple trips to the database:

The N+1 query example lives in discounts-service/, and the fixed version lives in discounts-service-fixed/.

Using different versions of the advertisement service to showcase the deploy comparison feature

It might be useful for certain workshops and demos (i.e. things related to canary deployments, feature flags, general APM ones) to showcase different versions of the advertisements services, and to compare the versions using Datadog.

To enable this scenario using Kubernetes:

1. Deploy the ecommerce application in your cluster:

kubectl apply -f deploy/generic-k8s/ecommerce-app

1. Delete the original advertisements deployment:

kubectl delete -f deploy/generic-k8s/ecommerce-app/advertisements.yaml

1. Deploy version 1.0 of the advertisements service:

kubectl apply -f deploy/generic-k8s/ecommerce-ads-versions/advertisements_v1.yaml

This version deploys version 1.0 of the advertisements version. This version always show a blue ads banner, also showing an advertisement number 1.x.

2. Deploy version 2.0 of the advertisement service:

kubectl apply -f deploy/generic-k8s/ecommerce-ads-versions/advertisements_v2.yaml

This version deploys version 2.0 of the advertisements version. This version always show a red ads banner, also showing an advertisement number 2.x. It also has an added latency of 0.5 seconds.

This keeps both deployments (v1 and v2) in the cluster, making a simple 50/50 canary deployment. As the service selectors are the same, 50% of the time, it will show an advertisement coming from version 1.0 and sometimes it will serve a banner coming from version 2.0.

3. Compare versions during the canary

Show in Datadog that even though the new version deploys the correct feature, it adds extra latency that we didn't see on previous versions.

To compare both versions, you can use the "Deployments" section of the advertisements service:

4. Deploy a patch release to fix the issue

kubectl apply -f deploy/generic-k8s/ecommerce-ads-versions/advertisements_v2_1.yaml

This versions has the same functionality as 2.0 but it doesn't have the increased latency. This replaces version 2.0.

5. Compare versions in Datadog

You can now compare version 1.0 and 2.1 and see that the increased latency is gone and things seems to be working fine.

How to run synthetics locally

1. Install @datadog/datadog-ci via NPM or Yarn globally on your local machine:

npm install -g @datadog/datadog-ci

yarn global add @datadog/datadog-ci

2. Obtain the API and APP Key from the DD corpsite account:
3. From the project root, run the following: DD_API_KEY="<API_KEY>" DD_APP_KEY="<APP_KEY>" make synthetics-start

To add a new test:

1. Generate a synthetics test via the DD app
2. Grab the public ID of the test (found in the top left of the synthetic page or in the URL) and add it to storedog.synthetics.json.