High performance and scalable multi-layer topology discovery systems and methods provide awareness of what services are present across a multi-layer network. The present disclosure achieves a high level of performance in service discovery, and, in addition, provides a form of scalability in proportion to network size by distributing service observation across servers in a cluster. The present disclosure defines a concept of change-proportional online run-time efficiency and thus provides an optimal design. Further, the present disclosure achieves horizontal scale, leveraging multiple cores across multiple servers.