Designing a visual flow map that lets engineers see how requests propagate across services, queues, and databases in modern distributed systems — turning thousands of raw spans into a story they can actually read.
Role
Lead Product Designer
Discipline
UX, Data Visualization, Prototyping
Tools
Figma, React, D3
Client
New Relic
Problem
Distributed systems are a black box.
Engineers responding to incidents in microservice architectures have to mentally stitch together hundreds of trace spans to find the root cause. The legacy trace view forced them to scroll, filter, and pivot through tables. We needed a single canvas that made causality visible.
Approach
A canvas you can read at a glance.
We designed a node-link map that groups spans by service, surfaces error rates and latency inline, and lets engineers expand any node into its underlying spans. The map auto-lays out on incident open so the responder sees the critical path within seconds.
Now accepting RFPs for FY25/26. Our customer success team is standing by to put together the right team for your digital advertising and product design needs.
