Service Fabric Explorer will allow you to see information on the selected node, and you will be able to drill down and see a rich amount of information regarding the Service Fabric cluster applications. It just another utility for administrators to use apart from the Service Fabric Explorer available in the browser.

There is some heated debate as to the manner in which developers should approach the microservices architecture. There are some that believe that when your goal as a developer is a microservices architecture for your application, you need to approach it from a monolith-first perspective. That is to say, write the big monolithic application first because that process is a familiar approach to development. After you have done that, plan and carve up the monolithic application into smaller microservices. The argument here is that the time to market is much quicker when creating a monolithic application. A quicker time to market means a quicker return on your investment.

Then the other side of the argument is that starting with a monolith is exactly the wrong approach to follow. The correct time to start thinking about how to carve up your application into pieces is at the design phase. The concession is made, however, that the development team will probably need to understand the system they are required to build. Another concession is made in the fact that it would probably be better to start off with a microservices approach when creating a second version of the existing monolith. A monolithic application by definition has all the parts tightly coupled to each other. How much time would it take to break these into smaller microservices?

Whichever approach you decide to take, it is one that must be decided on after careful consideration of all the facts involving all the stakeholders. Unfortunately, there is no formula or hard and fast rule to aid you in your decision. The decision regarding architecture of an application (monolithic versus microservices) will vary from project to project.