<p>I have a microservices based software architecture.</p>
<p>There is a php application which orchestrates the communication among microservices and the application's whole logic.</p>
<p>I need to simulate the communication between microservices as a graph.</p>
<p>There will be edges with weights , which will represent the affinities between microservices.</p>
<p>I am searching for a tool in order to collect all messages and their size.</p>
<p>I have read that there are distibuted tracing systems like Zipkin which i have already deployed, and could accomplish this task.</p>
<p>But, i cannot find how to collect the messages i want.</p>
<p>This is the php library i used for the instrumentation of my app</p>
<p>[https://github.com/openzipkin/zipkin-php]</p>
<p>Any ideas about other tools or how to use Zipkin differently to achieve my goal?</p>

Kostas Tsakos
<p>Let me add to this thread my three bits. Speaking of Envoy, yes, when attached to your application it adds a lot of useful features from observability bucket, e.g. network level statistics and tracing.</p>
<p>Here is the question, have you considered running your legacy apps inside service mesh, like Istio ?.</p>
<p>Istio simplifies deployment and configuration of Envoy for you. It injects sidecar container (istio-proxy, in fact Envoy instance) to your Pod application, and gives you these extra features like a set of service metrics out of the box*.</p>
<p>Example: Stats produced by Envoy in Prometheus format, like <code>istio_request_bytes</code> are visualized in Kiali Metrics dashboard for inbound traffic as <code>request_size</code> (check screenshot)</p>
<p>*as mentioned by @David Kruk, you still needs to have Prometheus server deployed in your cluster to be able to pull these metrics to Kiali dashboards.</p>
<p>You can learn more about Istio <a href="https://istio.io/latest/docs/examples/microservices-istio/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>. There is also a dedicated section on how to <a href="https://istio.io/latest/docs/tasks/observability/kiali/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">visualize metrics</a> collected by Istio (e.g. request size).</p>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/w4SNP.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/w4SNP.png" alt="enter image description here" /></a></p>
