Performance Metrics – What are they and why are they important?
In order to understand how fast your website is, we need some numbers. We call these fancy numbers performance metrics, objective measures that we can track over time. We can track them for seasonality as well as website traffic and growth. But we can also track them for feature and application changes based on deployments to see if new code has caused perfermance to improve or degrade.
Some useful business or application performance metrics include:
- user registrations
- accounts sold
- widgets sold
- user interactions & social metrics
- so-called gamification, ratings & related
We also want to capture lower-level system metrics with a tool like Cacti, Ganglia, Munin, OpenNMS, Zabbix or similar:
- cpu
- memory
- disk
- network
- load average
Along with the basic system level metrics you’ll want to collect some at the database level such as:
- InnoDB Buffer Pool activity
- Files & Tables
- Binary log activity
- Locking
- Sorting
- Temporary objects
- Queries/second
Sean Hull asks on Quora – What are web performance metrics and why are they important?
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