Merging replicas patterns

Concept

Hosts in your cluster may be replicas of the same service.

Spider includes a feature that merge on the UI the replicas of the same service.
To make use of this feature, you define a set of patterns to help Spider understand what hosts are replicas of the same service.

tip

Use this feature to reduce the number of visible hosts on the map or the sequence diagram.

Configuration

Patterns are defined in the Main settings and may be shared by the selected team.

How does it work?

1. The patterns are matched against the servers FQDN, and must include at least a capture group.
2. The groups are concatenated by '.' to return the 'common name' of the server.
3. First pattern to match wins.
4. All servers with same 'common name' may then be merged on the map, the sequence diagram and stats (when the related option is selected.)

note

On a Kubernetes cluster with workload identity resolved, actor (the real Kubernetes ownership) supersedes merge-replicas wherever it is available - it is exact, where a merge pattern is a guess. Merge-replicas is not retired: it still covers non-Kubernetes and unattached traffic, and it is disabled automatically on the map and in the sequence diagram / waterfall whenever they are identifying actors by workload instead - the two features would otherwise disagree about what counts as "the same server".

Where is it used?

Merge replicas feature is available on:

• Map, to merge nodes of the same service.
  • The tooltip then shows you all replicas.
• Sequence diagram, to merge hosts/actors of the same service
  • The tooltip then shows you all replicas.
• Stats
  • You may use merge replicas as a group for the pivots
• Dashboard

Examples

Pattern: ^(?:[\d]+-?)*\.?([\w+-]+?-service)

FQDN	Result
192-168-0-25.books-sales-service.mynamespace.svc.cluster.local	books-sales-service
192-168-1-143.books-sales-service.mynamespace.svc.cluster.local	books-sales-service

Pattern: ^(gateway)

FQDN	Result
gateway-59d55bf845-n485v	gateway
gateway-59d55bf845-y256t	gateway