Startup Netsil Inc. is coming out of stealth mode today with a monitoring and visualization platform for cloud applications that enables DevOps teams to see all services and their dependencies on a network without the need for additional coding.

Calling its service a “Google Maps of microservices applications,” Netsil said its Application Operations Center is a troubleshooting tool for organizations that make extensive use of containers, which allow applications to be moved among different computers, and microservices, or software components that can be combined to form full applications.

“We give you a real-time map of all the component containers along with their communications structure,” said Arvind Soni, vice president of product at the San Francisco-based company. “We tell you where there are traffic jams or failures.”

Applications that use microservices and containers are flexible and fast to build, but they also introduce complexity because interactions between services take place in the network rather than on a central server. That complicates the task of pinpointing and diagnosing errors.

Netsil installs one agent on each host to discover every container, Kubernetes pod, host and service endpoint automatically, along with all of the interactions among them. It samples and analyzes communications packets to determine not just which services are talking to each other, but also which protocols are being used and the nature of the communications. It can also deliver data on system-level information such as memory and processor use.

The platform goes beyond discovering dependencies to understanding them. “If you’re using Amazon cloud with DynamoDB, we understand the full DynamoDB protocol so we can give you real-time insights into what’s being asked of that [application program interface],” said Chief Operating Officer Shariq Rizvi. Maps also display service health metrics of latency, throughput and error rates for application programming interface calls, database queries, DNS lookups and several other service interactions, the company said.

Netsil executives said their platform is particularly useful in environments that use Kubernetes for container orchestration. Users can create maps of hosts, namespaces, services and pods, and drill down to diagnose problems in such areas as service configuration, service availability and service creation. The features are especially useful for companies that are migrating to Kubernetes.

Netsil has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from investors that include Mayfield Fund, Engineering Capital LLC and Moment Ventures LLC. The product came out of research at the University of Pennsylvania. Company executives include veterans of Twitter Inc. and VMware Inc.

The Application Operations Center supports all major cloud, container and orchestration platforms and is available both as an on-premises and hosted service with standard pricing of $35 per host per year. Enterprise pricing is custom-quoted.

Image: Netsil