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Software Engineering vocabulary · Debugging and Troubleshooting

Metric

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/ˈmɛtrɪk/nounCore term

In software engineering, metric means: A number measured regularly over time to show how a system is behaving, such as CPU use, memory, request count or error rate.

In Turkish: metrik, ölçüm, ölçüt

How it is used

Metrics are collected, exported, scraped, stored and shown on dashboards. Prometheus and CloudWatch are common tools. Alerts are usually based on metrics crossing a threshold.

Example sentences

  1. The memory metric has been climbing for a week, which looks like a memory leak.

  2. Let's add a metric for queue length so we can alert on it.

Common collocations

  • collect metrics
  • key metrics
  • custom metric
  • error rate metric
  • metrics dashboard
  • monitoringContinuously collecting and checking data about systems, such as CPU use, error rates and response times, so that problems are noticed quickly.
  • dashboardA screen that shows the most important metrics and charts about a system in one place, so engineers can see its health at a glance.
  • alertAn automatic notification sent to engineers when a monitored value crosses a limit or something looks wrong, for example when the error rate is too high.
  • observabilityHow well you can understand what is happening inside a system from the data it produces, especially logs, metrics and traces, even for problems nobody predicted.
  • logA record of events, messages and errors that a program writes while it runs, used later to understand what happened. Also a verb: to log an error.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Debugging and Troubleshooting

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