In the two previous chapters, we have seen how to use Kibana in order to visualize log data in the context of a business and a technical use case. We will now focus on metric analytics, which is fundamentally different in terms of data structure.
So, before starting this chapter, I would like to devote a few lines to the following question:
What is a metric?
A metric is an event that contains a timestamp and usually one or more numeric values. It is appended to a metric file sequentially, where all metric lines are ordered based on the timestamp. As an example, here are a few system metrics:
02:30:00 AM all 2.58 0.00 0.70 1.12 0.05 95.55 02:40:00 AM all 2.56 0.00 0.69 1.05 0.04 95.66 02:50:00 AM all 2.64 0.00 0.65 1.15 0.05 95.50
Unlike logs, metrics are sent periodically, for example, every 10 minutes (as the preceding example illustrates) whereas logs are usually...