Chapter 4. Strategies for Controlling Metric Data Growth
Metrics are growing in scale, and that means the data they produce also grows exponentially, far outpacing the growth of the business and its infrastructure (as shown in Figure 4-1). Growth this fast causes problems: storing all of the data your metrics produce about everything (logs, metrics, and traces) would be prohibitively expensive in terms of both cost and performance. In a survey of 357 IT, DevOps, and application development professionals by ESG, 71% saw the growth rate of observability data as “alarming.”1
Figure 4-1. Cloud native’s impact on observability data growth2
Why so much growth? The reasons include faster deployments, a shift to microservices architectures, the ephemerality of containers, and even the cardinality of metric data itself. This causes a dilemma: how should you identify which metric data is worth storing?
To answer this question, you need to understand the major use cases for metrics in your organization. Look at RPC traffic, request/response rates, and latency, ideally as they enter your system. If you have, for example, 100 microservices, how many dimensions should you add to your metrics? Should you capture all data as it comes in for each metric?
Metrics cardinalities can generally be classified into three types, as Chronosphere’s John Potocny notes:3
High-value cardinality
These ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month, and much more.
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
