Cloud Native Development Patterns and Best Practices

Measurements

The first step to increasing the observability of a component is to take measurements of the important aspects of the component. We refer to measurements as metrics. A metric is a time series of data points that we can monitor, aggregate, slice, and dice to observe the inner workings of the component. Each measurement consists of a name, a timestamp, a value, and a set of tags. The name denotes what is being measured, the timestamp indicates when it was measured, the value specifies how much was measured, and the tags qualify where the measurement was taken. The following is a measurement of the latency of a function:

aws.lambda.duration 2017-12-20 01:30:00 1ms region:us-east-1,functionname:helloworld

It is important to distinguish ...