Internal developer platforms (IDPs) have become essential for bridging the gap between development and operations. They provide developers with the autonomy they need while embedding guardrails to ensure stability and consistency across environments. But despite their utility, IDPs often fall short when it comes to providing visibility into real-time production environments. This lack of context can lead to inefficient troubleshooting, incomplete monitoring, and unexpected service degradation.
To address these challenges, platform engineering teams are turning to real-time topology as a way to enrich IDPs, offering dynamic insights into how services, infrastructure, and third-party dependencies behave in the real world. If you’d like to dive deeper into this topic, you can also watch my recent presentation at the Conf42 Platform Engineering conference. Below, I’ll explain how real-time topology can fill in the gaps and improve overall platform performance.
What’s missing from your IDP?
IDPs excel at organizing and managing services and resources during the development and deployment phases. But once those services are live, the story becomes more complex. Production environments aren’t static. They involve constantly shifting runtime configurations, external dependencies like third-party APIs, and resource allocation that changes depending on user load.
Without real-time context, an IDP may only reflect what *should* be happening based on a static catalog of configurations, but not what *is* happening in the live environment. For example, an IDP might show that a particular service has been successfully deployed with no errors—but if there’s a memory leak causing downstream services to fail, that problem will go unnoticed without visibility into runtime behavior.
This issue isn’t unique to platform engineering. Cybersecurity teams have faced similar challenges for years, evolving beyond static vulnerability assessments to include runtime analysis in order to understand the real-world attack surface. Platform engineering now faces a similar shift—runtime topology brings that missing context into focus.
Real-time topology as a solution
Real-time topology provides a constantly updated map of the entire runtime environment, covering applications, infrastructure, networks, and third-party services. This dynamic view brings crucial advantages to platform engineering:
- End-to-end visibility: Rather than relying on snapshots or predefined service catalogs, topology continuously tracks the state of services and their dependencies across the production environment. This eliminates the blind spots that static catalogs can’t address.
- Context for better decision-making: With topology data integrated into an IDP, teams can make more informed decisions. For instance, if a service is consuming too many resources or has a misconfiguration, the runtime topology immediately flags these issues and allows for quicker remediation.
- Less maintenance overheads: Keeping an IDP up to date with manual inputs is labor-intensive and error-prone. By automating the discovery and monitoring of runtime environments, real-time topology reduces the need for manual intervention, cutting down on technical debt.
How Senser helps
Senser helps internal developer platforms (IDPs) by providing real-time visibility into how services and dependencies behave in live environments, allowing teams to quickly detect and resolve issues. By automating service discovery and monitoring, Senser reduces manual maintenance and ensures that platforms reflect current conditions, helping teams spot problems early and maintain system performance without adding complexity.
Real-world use cases
Let’s look at a few examples of how real-time topology can enhance IDPs in practical scenarios.
Anticipating reliability issues
Imagine a service that handles high-volume transactions during peak business hours. Past incidents show that during these periods, memory overload often leads to cascading failures in downstream services like customer account dashboards. By incorporating real-time topology, platform engineers can correlate these historical incidents with real-time data on current deployments. This allows the team to proactively reinforce guardrails before a peak period, minimizing service disruptions and improving reliability.
Verifying deployments in real-time
IDPs generally come with pre-set guardrails to manage deployments, but those guardrails are often established based on idealized assumptions during development. Let’s say a new service starts consuming excessive CPU resources after it’s deployed. Without real-time topology, it might take hours—or even days—to detect the issue through manual monitoring or user reports. With real-time topology, the deviation is flagged immediately, allowing developers to fix the problem before it affects the user experience.
Investigating service degradation
In many cases, service degradation is caused by issues with third-party dependencies. For instance, a team might deploy a new feature, but users start experiencing slow response times or intermittent failures. The team suspects the issue lies with a third-party API the feature depends on, but static logs don’t provide enough clarity. Real-time topology enriches the view by tracking the status of all third-party resources, allowing the team to confirm whether the degradation is linked to the external service and, if so, take steps to address it or notify the provider.
Avoiding common pitfalls
Implementing real-time topology within an IDP isn’t without its challenges. A few key considerations to keep in mind:
- Maintenance debt: Building a closed loop between the service catalog and the runtime environment requires investment not just in the initial setup but in ongoing maintenance. Topology data needs to be continuously audited and updated to reflect changes in the environment.
- Incomplete context: Partial visibility won’t solve the problem. To be truly effective, real-time topology must account for all resources, including third-party services and APIs. Technologies like eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) can help provide that deep, real-time insight across the entire production stack.
- Avoiding static snapshots: The usefulness of real-time topology depends on its dynamic nature. A one-time or manually updated topology is no better than a static catalog. Instead, automated tools should be used to continuously map the runtime environment in real time.
Getting started with real-time topology
The good news is that many observability platforms already offer some level of topology mapping, though extensive configuration is often required. Look for tools that automate topology discovery using technologies like eBPF to reduce the setup effort.
Once your topology is mapped, the next step is to integrate it with your IDP. This enables tighter integration with observability and incident response platforms, making it easier to monitor and troubleshoot services in real time.
Finally, consider focusing on high-impact use cases first, such as real-time deployment verification or correlating past incidents with runtime data. These quick wins can demonstrate the value of real-time topology and provide a foundation for scaling its use across the SDLC.
Bottom line
IDPs are powerful, but their static nature can leave critical gaps in visibility and troubleshooting. Real-time topology fills those gaps by providing a dynamic, continuously updated view of the production environment. By enriching the IDP with this runtime context, platform engineering teams can make better decisions, catch issues earlier, and reduce operational overhead.
As platform engineering evolves, real-time topology will play a crucial role in building more resilient, scalable, and efficient systems. At Senser, we are proud to support this evolution by offering real-time observability that allows teams to proactively manage their platforms, reduce downtime, and ensure optimal performance at every stage of the development lifecycle.
