APM has two types of services: instrumented services, and uninstrumented services (aka dependencies). Dependencies are observed as the exit spans of instrumented services. This way we can infer error rates and latency for dependencies like databases, queues etc.

Uninstrumented services should have the same capabilities as instrumented services. This means it should be possible to create rules and ML jobs, and see related logs and metrics for a dependency. It should also be possible to list dependencies on the service inventory page and add them to service groups.

This will make it possible for users to monitor their dependencies like databases much more closely, instead of relying on inferred observations via their instrumented services.

Related:

• [APM] Rules for dependencies #166309