> Average anything is a terrible way to track anything.
Came here to say exactly this. And averages are especially insidious when used for data that doesn't have a symmetric distribution, like most latencies.
Author here. I think most people on HN would echo your sentinment about averages wholesale ... But I wanted to go a little deeper into selecting a better alternative for operational monitoring.
Its easy to say "averages are bad" but harder to say "use X instead", and explain why. We tried. Do you think we did it?
Well the title seems a bit childish (since obviously everybody on HN knows it's a terrible idea.) Why don't you change to post title to more appropriately reflect what you were trying to propose as an alternative.
Additional standard statistics like mode, median, quartiles etc are really useful.
And you can always throw things into gnuplot to get a quick, exploratory look at things. It will at least give you sense of whether you're looking at a normal distribution, something skewed, multi-modal distributions etc etc.
Author here. I think most people on HN would echo your sentinment about averages wholesale ... But I wanted to go a little deeper into selecting a better alternative for operational monitoring.
Its easy to say "averages are bad" but harder to say "use X instead", and explain why. We tried. Do you think we did it?