Standard deviation isn't the problem, skew is. Yes, skew will increase the standard deviation, but the heart of the issue here is how fat the right tail of the distribution is.

Standard deviation is often a useful metric, but it's at least as flawed as mean in skewed distributions because it doesn't treat either direction around the (already flawed) mean any differently.

hi nateabele,

Author here. Did you also search for stdev, st.dev, variance? Just kidding.

The post is not about averages. Its about selecting the right metric to track website performance. Standard deviation would surely qualify the avg. latency a bit, but it would still be a pretty lame alternative to using a better toplevel metric like Apdex.

Best, Mike