Lightweight Web Service Dependency Tool

In web applications with tier-wise architecture, a server in tier n takes services from a server in tier n+ 1. Determining service dependencies helps in debugging end user response time issues, to improve the quality of online experience and understanding the exact nature of dependencies amongst the tiers. Commercial tools with high licensing costs work by instrumenting the code, aid in analysis, but their impact on performance cannot be ignored. The tool presented in this paper is based on a simple and light weight technique to learn service dependencies from the network packet traces.