Architecting Modern Java EE Applications

High frequency monitoring versus sampling

Often, monitoring aims to collect technical metrics with a high frequency of many collections per second. The problem with this high frequency collection is that it heavily impacts the performance of the system. Metrics often get collected even if there is no performance regression.

As mentioned, application-level metrics, such as resource consumption, alone don't help much in identifying potential performance constraints. In the same way, the collection disrupts the responsiveness of the system.

Instead of monitoring with a high frequency it's advisable to sample metrics with lower frequency, such as for only a few times per minute. The theory behind statistical populations shows that these few samples ...