GripWorks

Both my co-founder and I are long time developers. We mostly work in the .NET ecosystem, though we have experience in other languages as well. We often help large companies to build and implement systems that run their core processes. Over the last few years, there's been a large shift to microservice architectures. The underpinnings of these architectures are frequently built using “messaging” products. AWS SQS, Kafka, RabbitMQ, and Azure Service Bus are some examples of this.

What we found is that, though there are development frameworks such as NServiceBus, MassTransit, which ease the development burden of having to write all kinds of low-level plumbing code. There seems to be little to none (friendly 🤓) tooling available to help design and development of these microservice oriented systems.

Our goal with GripWorks is to introduce a tool that captures all the messages that are exchanged between these autonomous services, and create a visual map of all communication channels. This helps to easily visualize which service sent which messages, and by which other services that message was consumed. We can even go one step further, and enable filtering and searching for message types, id’s, etc. to help debug or troubleshoot distributed application flows that involve many independent services.

We are mainly interested to figure out if we’re the only ones identifying this issue, or if there are other developers out there (from other ecosystems as well) that have maybe already solved this issue in different ways.