Performance measurement

 

Content source: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/dashboards/build-dashboards/best-practices/#use-method

USE method

USE stands for:

• Utilization - Percent time the resource is busy, such as node CPU usage
• Saturation - Amount of work a resource has to do, often queue length or node load
• Errors - Count of error events

This method is best for hardware resources in infrastructure, such as CPU, memory, and network devices. For more information, refer to The USE Method.

RED method

RED stands for:

• Rate - Requests per second
• Errors - Number of requests that are failing
• Duration - Amount of time these requests take, distribution of latency measurements

This method is most applicable to services, especially a microservices environment. For each of your services, instrument the code to expose these metrics for each component. RED dashboards are good for alerting and SLAs. A well-designed RED dashboard is a proxy for user experience.

For more information, refer to Tom Wilkie’s blog post The RED method: How to instrument your services.

The Four Golden Signals

According to the Google SRE handbook, if you can only measure four metrics of your user-facing system, focus on these four.

This method is similar to the RED method, but it includes saturation.

• Latency - Time taken to serve a request
• Traffic - How much demand is placed on your system
• Errors - Rate of requests that are failing
• Saturation - How “full” your system is