Behind the Scenes: How the OpenTelemetry Plugin Maps Your Microservices in Real-Time - The JetBrains Blog

JetBrains’ OpenTelemetry plugin includes a Service Map feature that uses live telemetry traces to automatically visualize how microservices, databases, and message queues interact at runtime, addressing the limitations of static architecture diagrams and code analysis. When an instrumented application is run from a supported JetBrains IDE, the plugin launches a local OpenTelemetry backend, receives spans, and incrementally constructs an architectural model that can be rendered in the IDE. Its stream-processing algorithm handles unordered and incomplete telemetry by classifying spans from semantic attributes, identifying services, and matching related client and server spans to establish cross-service connections, while applying different inference rules for database and messaging operations. Because it relies on OpenTelemetry semantic conventions rather than framework-specific APIs, the feature is language- and vendor-agnostic and can work across JVM, .NET, Python, Go, and other properly instrumented applications in IDEs including IntelliJ IDEA, GoLand, PyCharm, WebStorm, and Rider.

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