From the course: DevOps Foundations: Monitoring and Observability

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Metric types

Metric types

From the course: DevOps Foundations: Monitoring and Observability

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Metric types

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- [Ibukun] Metrics and numeric values that provide insights into the characteristics of a system. There are data points that can be aggregated and analyzed statistically, which then give you a measurement of a system's performance. Metrics come out the box with software that we use, but can also be custom defined to fit our business use cases. Depending on the observability tool you use, there are different types of supported metrics. The commonly supported ones are counters, gauges, and histograms. Counters are simple increments-only metrics that keep track of the number of occurrences of a specific event or activity. They're invaluable for measuring discrete event such as the number of API requests, error occurrences, or system restarts. Counters are particularly useful for tracking the volume of incoming requests to a web server. By monitoring the request counter, we can identify spikes in traffic and potentially…

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