> Average anything is a terrible way to track anything.
Came here to say exactly this. And averages are especially insidious when used for data that doesn't have a symmetric distribution, like most latencies.
Came here to say exactly this. And averages are especially insidious when used for data that doesn't have a symmetric distribution, like most latencies.
Author here. I think most people on HN would echo your sentinment about averages wholesale ... But I wanted to go a little deeper into selecting a better alternative for operational monitoring.
Its easy to say "averages are bad" but harder to say "use X instead", and explain why. We tried. Do you think we did it?
And you can always throw things into gnuplot to get a quick, exploratory look at things. It will at least give you sense of whether you're looking at a normal distribution, something skewed, multi-modal distributions etc etc.