Introduction:
Anypoint Visualizer displays views of different aspects of an application network graph. You can use the graph to explore your application network. Use cases for Anypoint Visualizer include architectural review, troubleshooting, and policy compliance.
Anypoint Visualizer automatically organizes APIs and integration applications deployed using the mule runtime into a comprehensive visualization of how they are connected.
Anypoint Visualizer Collects the data from Mule applications, APIs, and proxies deployed to
Cloud Hub to discover all incoming and outgoing connections.
Anypoint Visualizer Provides a real-time, graphical representation of running apps/APIs and displays views of different aspects of an application network graph:
- API Layer
- Dependencies
- API Consumers
Why Anypoint Visualizer
With the decentralization of IT and with the adoption of APIs and microservices, enterprises are struggling to keep up with an accurate view of deployed APIs and their dependencies. This lack of visibility often translates into quality issues in the form of failed deployments, a lengthy process of identifying and diagnosing production issues, increased technical debt, and less reuse of available assets.
Customers are struggling to have an up-to-date view of their APIs and how they are connected throughout the lifecycle.
It is a significant opportunity to improve customer’s reuse and security, and reduce the time to production of APIs (faster & easier)
It Significant opportunity to improve the monitoring and troubleshooting experience by providing context.
It is the Opportunity to indirectly drive the adoption of API Manager and Monitoring Center.
The following image shows how a typical application network appears in Anypoint Visualizer.
Anypoint Visualizer Connections are based on traffic between applications in the last seven days. It is also useful to inspect performance metrics or policy information and it is defined views, arrange applications in layers and customize the labels displayed for nodes and connections.
Visualizer Uses
- Discussing Current Design State
- Identifying redundant connections
- Define, and visualize implementing API-led
- Visualizing in-flight development impact to architecture
- Reducing time for production issue identification
- Ensuring Policy Compliance
Architecture Visualization
In this visualization, you can change the display names of nodes, add tags, and assign nodes to layers. The Architecture visualization is most useful for documentation and presentation purposes since you can share your network’s architecture without visible metrics. The Architecture visualization shows the topology of your application network.
Architecture Visualization
When you select a node within the canvas, the node and its dependency stack are highlighted, and all unconnected nodes are unavailable. Anypoint Visualizer displays information about the node in a card. This card is divided into the following tabs:
- Details Provide information about the node.
- Customization Provides information about the layer to which the node is assigned, and the tags assigned to the node. You can edit the node’s display name or change the layer and tags from this section.
Set Up Anypoint Visualizer
- Roles and Permissions
• Read applications permission
– Can only view graphs
• View or Manage policies
– Useful to view policies in a visualizer.
• Visualizer Editor
– Custom roles can be assigned to this permission scope.
- Layers
- Nodes can be assigned to default layers provided by MuleSoft or to custom layers.
- Default layers cannot be deleted, but unassigned.
- Nodes automatically appear in the specified layer.
- If the layer doesn’t exist, it is automatically created.
- Only one layer can be assigned to one node.
- Layers can be assigned via system UI or runtime properties.
- Layer assigned using properties can’t be overwritten in UI.
- Layers can be reordered using arrows.
- Tags
- Useful to group nodes for specific use cases.
- Tags are assigned as application property, not the server property
- Multiple tags are allowed.
- Same as layers, tags can be assigned via property or UI.
- The same tag cannot be applied multiple times to one node.
- Case sensitive
- Views
- Provide a single source of truth that is accessible to team members across environments.
- Views display the saved filter selection of tags and environments.
- Any existing or new apps deployed that match the selected filters are added in the view automatically.
- Visualizer editors can create auto-discoverable views.
- Only users with the Visualizer Editor permission can create defined views.
- Only editors can create, rename, and edit defined views.
- Views can be edited, delete, or shared.
- Private views are accessible only to the editor.
- Troubleshooting Visualization
- Shows the current and past health of Mule apps.
- From this visualization, you can navigate to Anypoint Monitoring dashboards or logs.
- Matrices provide monitoring stats for the selected node.
- Stats include average response time, average throughput, failure rate, average CPU utilization, and average memory utilization.
- Matric is not applicable for some use cases which depends on the selection of matric type and node.
- Policies Visualization
- Shows the relationship between Mule app deployments and the APIs they are implementing, and which policies have been applied to those APIs.
- Metadata comes from API Manager.
Visualizer Recommendations
- Create Layers and Tags, provide Friendly names
- Layers traditionally align to the API-led model
- Tags from grouping of services, node can have multiple tags attached
- Display Name provides a human readable title to a node
- Automate Assignment of Tags and Layers in CI/CD
- anypoint.platform.visualizer.displayName=<name>
- anypoint.platform.visualizer.tags=<name>, <name>
- anypoint.platform.visualizer.layer=<name>