medium10 pts · first answer countslatencymonitoring

Percentiles vs average latency

Why do SREs usually track p95 or p99 latency rather than average latency?

A.Percentiles are cheaper to store than averagesB.Averages cannot be calculated from Prometheus histogramsC.Percentiles are always lower than the average, so the numbers look betterD.The average hides the slow tail: a few very slow requests affect many real users but barely move the mean

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