Live Service Graph Discovery
The declared architecture says service A never calls service C. The live service graph — discovered from actual traffic via a service mesh, eBPF flow mapping, or trace aggregation — says whether that is true in production today. A sensor of architectural fact, checked against architectural intent.
Sensor properties
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Oracle strength | High — observed traffic is not arguable |
| Independence | High — collected outside the services themselves |
| Scope | System |
| Feedback latency | Minutes |
| Actionability | Guiding — shows exactly which edge appeared that shouldn’t exist |
| Type | Retrospective |
What it cannot detect
Edges that are legitimate but unwise, and edges that exist only under rare load patterns not yet observed. The discovered graph is a lower bound on the real one; boundary sensors enforce the upper bound at build time, and the two are strongest together.