An embodiment may involve, in response to determining that a software service satisfies a degradation criterion, generating an alert that indicates the software service and a change request specifying that configuration data used by the software service was changed in a current snapshot of the configuration data; based on the change request, determining a set of configuration changes between the current snapshot and a previous snapshot of the configuration data; and providing a representation of the set of configuration changes indicating one or more parameters that were changed in the current snapshot and one or more paths in a tree-based arrangement of the configuration data that lead to the one or more parameters that were changed in the current snapshot.