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> 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 h
by stephencanon 14y ago
> 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.
- mvolo 14y agohi Steve, 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?
- chetanahuja 14y agoWell 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.
- jacques_chester 14y agoAdditional 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.