CAT is a distributed application performance monitoring and alerting system that specializes in tracking request flows, exceptions, and metrics across microservice ecosystems. It offers real-time dashboards showing throughput, response times, error rates, and service dependency graphs to help operations and development collaborate on reliability issues. In addition to metrics, it enables tracing—propagating context across RPC boundaries so problems like latency spikes or failed calls can be traced end-to-end. Alert rules and anomaly detection can be defined to notify teams proactively. The system supports multiple data backends and ingestion pipelines to collect data from JVM, C/C++, Python, and other ecosystems. With the collected data, Cat supports analysis of hotspots, trending anomalies, and capacity planning to drive continuous reliability improvements.
Features
- Supports multiple client languages (Java, C/C++, Node.js, Python, Go)
- Serves as a foundational middleware monitoring component within Meituan-Dianping’s infrastructure
- Offers alerting, logging, and performance tracking across distributed services
- Designed for high-throughput environments with scalable tracking abilities
- SDKs available for major languages including Go (via GoCat)
- Open source repository enabling community contributions and extensions