Exploring metric types and best practices
Metrics, along with logs, are an essential tool for software developers (Diego) and operators (Ophelia), providing them with indicators regarding the state of applications and systems. Resource usage data is great for monitoring a metric that captures numerical data over time. There are many different types of resources but some good examples would be CPU or RAM usage, the number of messages in a queue, and the number of received HTTP requests. Metrics are frequently generated and easily enriched with labels, attributes, or dimensions, making them efficient to search and ideal in determining if something is wrong, or different from usual.
A metric commonly has the following fields:
- Name: This uniquely identifies the metric
- Data point value(s): The data that’s stored varies by metric type
- Dimensions: Additional enrichment labels or attributes that support analysis
Metrics capture the behavior of the data they...