Netflix has released Hystrix, a library designed for managing interactions between distributed systems, complete with “fallback” options for when those systems inevitably fail.

The code for Hystrix—which Netflix tested on its own systems—can be downloaded at Github, with documentation available here, in addition a getting-started guide and operations examples, among others.

via Netflix Gives Data Center Tools to Fail.

Netflix will also release the real-time dashboard it uses for monitoring Hystrix. That dashboard relies on a traffic-light system to display service dependencies for the last ten seconds, with colors measuring latency and the size of the circles showing traffic.