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DevOps & Automation · Intermediate

Metric Types

The kinds of metrics used in monitoring systems such as Prometheus: counter, gauge, histogram, and summary.

Definition

A counter only increases (or resets), such as total requests. A gauge goes up and down, such as memory usage. A histogram counts observations into configurable buckets for server-side quantiles, and a summary computes quantiles client-side.

Example

http_requests_total is a counter; node_memory_available_bytes is a gauge.

Exam tip

Choosing counter vs gauge is a common question; anything that can decrease is a gauge.

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