Current version: 1.1.0

This project wants to help you finding hotspots in your Akka application by visualizing your message flows like it is shown on the next picture. Actors are displayed as nodes, message flows are displayed as arrows. The thicker an arrow is displayed, the more messages have been sent this way. You can get the actor path by clicking the nodes. The number shown on a node represents the mailbox size of this actor.

The collector is the component that collects the mailbox data and sends it to the visualization server. To integrate the collector into your project you just have to add the dependency to your build file and set the collector mailbox for the akka default dispatcher.

build.sbt

libraryDependencies += "de.aktey.akka.visualmailbox" %% "collector" % "1.1.0"

application.conf:

akka.actor.default-mailbox.mailbox-type = "de.aktey.akka.visualmailbox.VisualMailboxType"

It will collect your mailbox data and send it in chunks of 40 data sets or at least every second to the visualization server.

The visualisation component receives the mailbox data at udp:https://0.0.0.0:60009, which can be changed in the application.conf by overriding

de.aktey.akka.visualmailbox {
  server {
    address {
      host: "localhost"
      port: 60009
    }
  }
}

It servers a web surface at https://localhost:8080, that renders the messages with vis.js The web server can be changed to listen at a different interface by overriding in the application.conf

de.aktey.akka.visualmailbox {
  web.server {
    address {
      host: "0.0.0.0"
      port: 8080
    }
  }
}

It uses the JavaScript keyword "class" and the "EventSource" API, so it is viewable with Chrome 42+ or Firefox 45+. Other browsers I did not try.

To run the server, you have to have node.js and bower installed. To prepare the web part you need to do

bower install

in the project root directory, then

sbt "project visualization" run

to run the server.

There is docker image on https://hub.docker.com. You can run it with

docker run -ti --rm -p 8080:8080 -p 60009:60009/udp ouven/akka-visual-mailbox-visualization

The sample project puts it all together, to show the usage and to play arround with pictures. You can run it with

sbt "project sample-project" run

The common project contains the protocol and common config stuff.