The Service Map shows observed dependency endpoints, services, databases, or messaging systems, as nodes, and aggregates all calls between each pair of endpoints into one edge over the selected time range. Use it to see how your services connect, and to spot which endpoint is receiving errors right now.
Prerequisites
- This section assumes that your application is already instrumented. For details about how you can instrument your application, see the Instrument Your Application section.
- This section assumes that you are familiar with the basics of monitoring applications.
Overview
Select Service Map in the left navigation.
How To Read The Map
Node color shows the health of the calls a node receives from other nodes, over the selected time range:
- Green: no errors on the calls this node receives.
- Red: at least one error on a call this node receives. This can be any error status on a span, not only HTTP 4xx.
Node size shows the relative rate of calls a node receives. A bigger node receives more requests than a smaller node in the same map.
Edge color has no meaning. The map assigns each edge a color based on its target node, so that edges going to different nodes stay visually distinct. Do not read edge color as a health or latency signal.
Edge direction shows the direction of calls: animated particles travel along each edge from the calling node to the called node. Particle speed has no meaning either. Read call rate from the hover tooltip instead.
Hover For Details
Hover over an edge to see:
- P99 latency
- Request rate (requests per second)
- Error rate (percent of calls on that edge that failed)
Hover over a node to see its endpoint name. The map has no drill-down: clicking a node or edge does not open a details panel. To dig into a specific service, use Application Details instead, or open Trace Explorer filtered to that service.
Filters
Use the Select Environment/s dropdown to limit the map to one or more deployment environments.
The search box next to it filters by resource attribute, but only two keys apply to the Service Map:
deployment.environmentk8s.cluster.name
Any other attribute you add here has no effect on the map, including k8s.cluster.namespace, which appears as a filter option but is not applied. If none of your services carry the two supported attributes, the box shows "No resource attributes available to filter."
Troubleshooting
The map shows "No Service Found"
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Likely cause: no traces reached SigNoz for the selected time range, or your services do not export traces at all.
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Fix: confirm traces are flowing. See Prerequisites for instrumentation steps, and widen the time range in the top bar.
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Verify: Application Details shows at least one service for the same time range.
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Likely cause: traces exist, but no span in the selected time range shows a call from one dependency endpoint to another. The map only draws a node when it can pair a caller and a callee, so a service with no recorded call to another service, database, or messaging system still produces an empty map.
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Fix: widen the time range, then generate a traced request that calls another service, a database, or a messaging system. For a call to another service, confirm trace context propagates to the called service (the same trace ID on both sides of the call).
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Verify: after the request, the map shows an edge from the calling service to that service, database, or messaging system.
A service I expect is missing from the map
- Likely cause: that service made no call to, and received no call from, any other service, database, or messaging system in the selected time range, so it has no edge to draw.
- Fix: widen the time range. For a call to another service, confirm trace context propagates from the calling span to the called service.
- Verify: the service appears in Trace Explorer with root spans in the same window.
Next Steps
- Trace Explorer: filter and inspect the spans behind any edge.
- Alerts Management: alert on the error rate or latency you see on the map.
Get Help
If you need help with the steps in this topic, please reach out to us on SigNoz Community Slack. If you are a SigNoz Cloud user, please use in product chat support located at the bottom right corner of your SigNoz instance or contact us at cloud-support@signoz.io.
