Metric
A numeric time-series signal used to quantify system behavior such as rate, latency, utilization, saturation, or error count.
Observability Context
A metric is a numeric time-series signal used to quantify rates, errors, utilization, saturation, latency, and other system behavior. Counters, gauges, and histograms provide compact aggregate views that are inexpensive to retain compared with per-request detail.
Aggregation Boundary
Metrics do not reconstruct the causal path of one request the way a trace can. Label or attribute cardinality must also be controlled because an apparently simple metric can become expensive when dimensions grow without bound.