Understanding the interactions between users and versions in multi-tenant systems

Multi-tenant systems represent a class of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications in which several groups of users, i.e. the tenants, share the same resources. This resource sharing results in multiple business organizations using the same base application, yet, requiring specific adaptations or extensions for their specific business models. Each configuration must be tended to during evolution of a multi-tenant system, because the existing application is mended, or because new tenants request additional features. In order to facilitate the understanding of multi-tenant systems, we propose to use a runtime topology augmented with user and version information, to help understand usage patterns exhibited by tenants of the different components in the system. We introduce Serviz, our implementation of the augmented runtime topology, and evaluate it through a field user study to see to which extent Serviz aids in the analysis and understanding of a multi-tenant system.