Introducing the Multiplayer beta: debug distributed software better

Most modern software systems are distributed systems, but documentation and debugging a distributed system isn’t easy.

The benefits of low-latency, highly available and scalable applications are clear, but the complexity of modern systems in terms of layers of software, new technologies, architecture patterns, and the number of tools needed to manage them continues to increase.

In today's rapidly evolving engineering landscape, it has become increasingly important for engineers to have a strong, real-time understanding of their systems. As the foundation of any engineering project, system architecture provides a comprehensive blueprint outlining how various components and subsystems interact.

Backend software platforms can be complex and intricate, often overwhelming engineers who are new to the field. It doesn’t help that the available tools to visualize, observe and debug systems are not purpose-built for developers.

The key to mastering system visibility and “taming” its inherent complexity, is to leverage tools that allow you to visualize all the components and dependencies of an architecture in real-time.

While your systems may remain complex, debugging and documenting it doesn’t have to be complicated. With Multiplayer it becomes effortlessly collaborative and intuitive.

What are we trying to fix?

Multiplayer was built by a team of backend developers. We are painfully familiar with all the issues teams experience when debugging technical issues, managing a legacy system, adding new features or re-factoring software.

They face a myriad of challenges that bog down efficiency and stifle innovation. Our mission is to solve the pain points that come with collaborating on distributed software.

• Lack of immediate insight. Current tools fail to provide a live view of your logical system architecture and real-time system behaviour across all layers of the stack. Leaving teams in the dark about how components interconnect and what their dependencies are. At best, this gap leads to long debugging sessions, misalignment, prolonged onboarding, and challenges in security assessments. At worst, it can result in system failures, downtime, security vulnerabilities, integration problems, scalability issues, and more.
• High maintenance effort. Keeping documentation in sync with the actual systems demands considerable effort. And even then, documentation drift is a constant specter for most teams.
• Alignment challenges. A persistent struggle to achieve consensus between many different stakeholders (developers, support, QA, DevOps, PMs, etc.). The lack of visibility and collaboration results in errors, unnecessary rework, issues with implementation and the accumulation of technical debt.
• Resource fragmentation and context switching. Developers have to comb through multiple sources of knowledge (Session Replay tools, APM tools, Jira, GitHub, Confluence, Slack, Notion, Google Doc’s, their coworker’s brains, etc.) to cobble together a complete picture of a system or its behaviour.

These pain points exist because current tools were not purpose-built for backend engineers working on distributed systems.