A metric is a quantitative measure of a system property used to track health or performance. Operations for Applications supports metrics in its own data format as well as other standard formats, such as Graphite, OpenTSDB, and formats generated by cloud-based services such as AWS.
Once metrics are ingested into Operations for Applications, administrators can query and chart the data to help understand underlying patterns. You can create alerts to notify operators when anomalous values indicate a problem.
All users can then receive alerts, drill down into the prepared dashboards and charts, and start finding the root cause for problems.
The retention period varies based on the metric type:
- Persistent metrics are retained for 18 months. By default, all ingested metrics are persistent but convertible.
- Ephemeral metrics are retained for 28 days. Most of the internal metrics are ephemeral and they are not convertible.
A Super Admin user in Super Admin mode can change the ephemerality of individual metrics or metrics namespaces. Converting persistent metrics to ephemeral improves the query performance and reduces the cardinality.
Obsolete metrics are automatically hidden. You can also manually hide metrics. Hidden metrics are removed from autocomplete, but you can still use them in queries when data values are present.
Note: The obsolescence period for metrics and sources might vary. You can see your current configuration by looking into the Advanced settings of any chart or dashboard. To change this configuration, contact Technical Support.