Monitor 100% of your distributed application

in real time with negligible overhead, no

sampling, and no code changes.

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www.flowmill.com
 S
ervice architectures today are increasingly
About Flowmill
distributed. Development and operations teams,
aided by platforms like Kubernetes, build, deploy,
and update services quickly. These fast development cycles,
together with infrastructure-as-a-service and an increasing
number of managed services and 3rd party APIs, have
accelerated the pace of innovation, but have also created
challenges around stability and visibility across an
increasingly complex system.

Flowmill is a monitoring tool purpose-built for this world of

distributed applications. By tracking and analyzing the flow
of data between every host, pod, and container, Flowmill
provides a real time, complete picture view of a distributed
application without requiring any code changes.

This includes:

• Every service to service interaction

• Stability of the underlying infrastructure / IaaS

• Reliability of managed services and APIs

How Flowmill helps Flowmill helps operations teams monitor their distributed
applications by automatically tracking and analyzing the flow
of data between every part of their application.

Flowmill programmatically monitors every service

dependency to provide a real time view of your application
architecture, helping you catch unexpected interactions and
make informed decisions. It accelerates fault resolution by
pinpointing problems between any pair of services across
multiple dimensions and assessing the health of cloud
infrastructure and managed services. Additionally, Flowmill
helps you track traffic patterns to discover high volume or
expensive communication and optimize your services for
cost or performance.


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Technology Pinpoint problems between services

Isolate issues between any pair of services across multiple dimensions,

assess the health of cloud infrastructure, and determine whether managed
service providers are meeting SLAs.

See your complete architecture

Programmatically monitor all of your service dependencies in real time,
catch unexpected or undesirable interactions, and make informed
architectural decisions.

Track usage and consumption

Discover high volume or expensive communication patterns, identify
specific services to optimize for cost or performance, and audit your high
availability / DR behavior.

Flowmill is the result of years of research from the Israeli

Defense Force (IDF) and MIT. It provides a complete view of
application and infrastructure health while consuming
minimal host and network resources. An extremely high
performance agent on each host (VM / bare metal) sends a
detailed “flight recording” of all communication collected
directly from the operating system to the cloud-based
Flowmill service. The Flowmill agent is built for easy
deployment and can achieve 100% coverage with no code
changes or per service configuration .

The Flowmill service operates an extremely efficient

processing pipeline designed to turn measurements into
actionable alerts in seconds. The service receives
information from each agent, matches the two ends of each
service-to-service connection, and builds real time,
aggregate views based on application metadata from the
cloud platform or orchestration layer (AWS / Kubernetes /
user defined tags /etc). Flowmill can even monitor 3rd party
services by sitting on only one end of a connection and
passively monitoring an external service or API. 


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 What Does Flowmill Flowmill captures sub-second data per socket per host /
Measure? container without sampling. This means that it can gather
large amounts of data for every service to service interaction
in very short time intervals. The Flowmill service aggregates
and summarizes this information and applies well-
established statistical approaches to automatically identify
deviations across multiple dimensions and help you answer
critical questions about their cause and scope.

Flowmill collects a combination of system and application

level metrics without requiring any changes to the
application itself. Network-level metrics, such as throughput,
packet drops, connection failures, and round trip time are
automatically matched with application metadata and
context, such as thread, process, container, and service
names. Network metrics are uniformly available from the
operating system and can be gathered with minimal
overhead. By matching these metrics directly to the source
and destination processes and containers, Flowmill can
pinpoint changes in behavior between any pair of services
and problems in the infrastructure itself to quickly narrow the
search space during an incident.

Flowmill augments system level metrics with application

metrics such as HTTP error codes and latencies whenever
possible. It automatically discovers and collects this
information from the application framework and the service
mesh without any changes to the application code itself.


No code changes Negligible overhead External Visibility Precision alerting

Data gathered transparently Minimal CPU and network See beyond your application Sub-second data on every
from the operating system impact so you can deploy in into managed services and connection yields accurate,
and service mesh. production. cloud infrastructure. specific events.

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Types of Questions Application Health
Flowmill Answers
• Which of my services is down / unhealthy now?

• Is the problem limited to a specific zone,

namespace, or set of hosts?

• Is the new version of my service behaving

differently than the previous one?

• Which client is pounding our shared database

Infrastructure Health

• Everything seems broken. Could DNS be down in

my cluster?

• My service owners are telling me “Kubernetes is

dropping my packets.” How can I prove it’s not true?

• Is there a misconfigured security rule that is blocking

connections to a service?

• Is our cloud database really responding slowly to our

queries? Our provider says its “fine”.

Architecture and Traffic Patterns

• We don’t have any service dependencies between

staging and prod, right?

• Which service is generating this expensive cross

zone traffic?

• Are there any new dependencies on my service?

• Can you show me all of the upstream and

downstream dependencies for my service.?.

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Company Information Flowmill is a Sunnyvale, CA venture-backed company
founded in 2016.

Supported Platforms

• CentOS, Amazon Linux, Debian, Ubuntu

• Linux kernels: 4.4+

Interested in learning more?

http://www.flowmill.com

sales@flowmill.com