Master Thesis – The Hunt for Bottlenecks in Distributed Systems – IKEA of Sweden

About this role

Hej Master thesis student, Do you want to furnish the future to make room for everyone? Modern distributed systems generate massive amounts of telemetry data, but identifying what actually causes performance issues remains a challenge. While metrics, logs, and traces provide visibility, they often fail to explain where time is spent inside a system, creating "unattributed latency" and making bottlenecks difficult to detect and resolve.

In this thesis, you will explore how observability data can be correlated and analyzed to identify bottlenecks, explain system behavior, and support performance optimization in production-scale distributed systems. Your new assignment You will design and evaluate a framework for observability and bottleneck detection that helps engineering teams understand system performance beyond individual metrics and dashboards. The thesis will include: Investigating methods for correlating metrics, logs, and traces across distributed systems Designing a framework for identifying performance bottlenecks and unattributed latency Establishing data-driven baselines for system behavior Exploring how latency, resource consumption, and compute cost can be combined to detect bottlenecks Evaluating the framework in a production-scale environment The deliverables are: A framework for observability and bottleneck detection in distributed systems Dashboards and visualizations describing system behavior and performance deviations Guidelines for establishing baselines and identifying bottlenecks Recommendations for performance optimization and future automation opportunities An end report written in English What we'd like you to bring to the table We think that you: Are currently pursuing a Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Science, Information Systems, or a related field Have an interest in distributed systems, observability, system performance, and cloud-native technologies Enjoy data analysis, problem-solving, and turning complex information into actionable insights Are fluent in English More information Inter IKEA Group is the group of companies that connects IKEA franchisees with range development and suppliers and aligns the overall IKEA strategic direction.