Cat is a distributed application performance monitoring tool and tracing framework designed to track transactions, latency, and health across distributed services. It functions as a Kubernetes-native monitoring stack that utilizes multi-language monitoring clients and a real-time alerting system to maintain system visibility.
The system provides monitoring clients for Java, Go, Python, Node.js, and C++ to collect performance metrics and trace data. It distinguishes itself by sampling request flows to record call chains and identify bottlenecks, while using a monitoring engine to trigger immediate notifications when performance indicators breach defined thresholds.
The observability surface includes distributed trace analysis, application error logging, and web endpoint monitoring. It aggregates performance metrics and transaction data to generate statistical health reports and identify problematic requests through metadata capture and transaction tracking.
The project is packaged for containerized deployment and supports automated installation via Helm charts.