Useful Metrics
A couple of years ago, I was helping with an acquisition at my company. The company we were acquiring had one product, a B2B web app. One of the things that came up during the first couple of days of reviewing their system setup was their monitoring. They had some very nice looking Grafana dashboards set up. I want to discuss one of them in particular, because I don’t really remember what the others said. It almost doesn’t matter at this point. The title was something like “Number of Errors”, and the developers told us, pretty much verbatim, “As long as the number of errors stays around two hundred thousand, everything is fine”. I didn’t say this at the time, but what I was thinking was “I’m sorry, 200,000?? That’s just a constant amount of errors that are happening at all times??” I should have said it out loud. Then we might have had a more productive discussion about what the variance of that number is. Is 300k “around”? Is 100k “around”? But I was not experienced enough at the time to know that that was a bad way of doing things, even if I may have felt it in my gut, so I just made a note. ...