Metrics Collection
Metrics collection is the systematic process of gathering, aggregating, and storing quantitative data about the performance, behavior, and health of software systems, infrastructure, and applications. It involves tracking key indicators such as response times, error rates, resource utilization, and business metrics to enable monitoring, alerting, and analysis. This practice is fundamental to observability, helping teams understand system behavior, diagnose issues, and make data-driven decisions.
Developers should learn metrics collection to build reliable, scalable, and maintainable systems, as it provides visibility into application performance and infrastructure health in production environments. It is essential for use cases like performance optimization, capacity planning, incident response, and ensuring service-level agreements (SLAs), particularly in distributed systems, microservices architectures, and cloud-native applications where traditional debugging methods fall short.