Entrypoint Details Quick Peek • Archium

Archium’s ‘Quick Peek’ videos give you a demo of a single feature of Archium in just 2 minutes. and how it can help your team. Watch the Quick Peek about Entrypoint Details below:

Entrypoint Details

Last week I showed you Component Details: how you can browse to any Component and see its description, owning teams, repositories, and external links. We also so its API Entrypoints, its relationships to other Components, and even which of the system’s features the Component is involved in.

Because Archium builds a highly-detailed architecture model, we can also browse to individual API Entrypoints and get this same level of detail. I’ve chosen a couple of interesting Entrypoints in our fictional music streaming architecture for us to look at.

First we’re going to look at a REST Entrypoint on the User Security service, an internal API. This entrypoint is a POST to the /login path, used for authenticating users.

A screenshot of an Entrypoint Details pane in the Archium service catalog, showing the details of a REST endpoint for authenticating users. The view lists the Flows supported by the entrypoint, as well as its inbound and outbound dependencies. — The details pane of an entrypoint on an internal API for authenticating users.

You can see that this Entrypoint is used by 5 different Flows in the system, which start at 5 different frontends. We can also see that it’s got 5 incoming dependencies.

This is really handy information to have in a situation where you want to change how this Entrypoint works, or deprecate it in favour of a new one. You can see instantly:

which features of the system will be affected,
the consumers that will need to change,
and with a click of the mouse you can see which teams you’ll need to talk to.

Finding Event Subscribers

Now let’s look at an Entrypoint on this system’s Kafka cluster. This one represents a topic called ‘UserAudioPlays’ containing events fired each time a user starts playing some audio.

A screenshot of an Entrypoint Details pane in the Archium service catalog, showing the details of a Kafka topic for events about users playing audio. The Outbound Dependencies section shows which downstream components are subscribing to the events from this topic. — The details pane of an entrypoint on a Kafka cluster for publishing events about users playing audio.

Supported Flows doesn’t tell us anything we couldn’t have guessed. But down in Outbound Dependencies, we get a list of every Component that reads from this Kafka topic. It’s not just telling us which Components talk to Kafka. It also tells us which Components listen to these specific events.

If you’re building a system with asynchronous messaging, knowing how different types of messages trigger downstream Components is crucial to understanding the interactions and dependencies in your system.

But if your service catalog only records dependencies at the Component level, then all it can tell you is, “These services talk to Kafka”, which you probably already knew.

With Archium, because of its detailed architecture model, you’re able to understand your system better by revealing information like this that you don’t have access to anywhere else.

We hope you enjoyed that quick peek at the Entrypoint Details feature of the Archium service catalog.

What Next?

Want to see more of Archium’s unique capabilities? Check out our Quick Peek videos playlist on YouTube.

Got questions about what Archium is and how it works? You’ll probably enjoy our Frequently Asked Questions.

Want to try Archium for your team? Get in touch so we can set you up with a free trial.

Quick Peek: Entrypoint Details