How to build reporting in Microservices Architecture? [closed]

Question

While doing a POC around Microservices architecture; one of the challenges that I need to explain it that how to obtain reporting data from different services in an effecient way?

I would appreciate guiding me in the right direction.

Answer 1

If the data spans over multiple microservices then it depends on the business use case. In my opinion there are couple of ways to do it

Approach 1 query microservices dbs (not a preferred approach)

If your microservices are not very load intensive then you may query the data from all the services databases at off peak time and insert records into your warehouse database. This is not preferred approach since you are still putting additional load to services but it's easier . Also the reporting data may not be in realtime.

Approach 2 Event sourcing/CQRS

This approach is very preferred since your write and read models are completely separate. In brief the way if works is events generated by your different microservices will also be updating your read models called materialized view. If you have requirement where your reporting data requires near real time data then this is the way to go forward. You can shape your reporting model as you like and you can create multiple reporting models using events. But this is complex approach and require application design accordingly. However the benefits are countless. You may want to reach more about Event Sourcing and CQRS if you are interested.

Approach 3 have read only replicas

If you are using cloud services you can create readonly replicas of your databases and can use them for reporting. this is widely accepted approach since you are not impacting transactional databases. but this may be expensive since you are paying for additional databases.