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---
name: metrics-and-tracing
description: Instrument systems so failures are visible before users report them.
---
# Metrics and tracing
Instrumentation should answer whether the system is healthy, and if not, where it broke.
## Measure what users experience
Track request rate, error rate, latency and saturation at the boundaries users touch. Internal
counters that no symptom maps to generate noise rather than signal.
## Use percentiles, never averages
Averages conceal the tail where the damage is. Watch the high percentiles, because those are the
requests people notice and complain about.
## Trace across service boundaries
Distributed traces show where time is spent in a request that crosses processes. In any system of
more than a couple of services, this is the only practical way to locate latency.
## Alert on symptoms, not causes
Alert when users are affected, and let dashboards explain why. Cause-based alerts fire on conditions
that are frequently harmless, and their volume trains people to ignore them.
## Make every alert actionable
An alert nobody can act on is noise that erodes attention. Each one needs an owner, a clear
meaning and a documented first response.
