Tag
quantiles
- Mar 6, 2026 Histogram Buckets, the +Inf Bucket, and How Quantiles Are Interpolated Why histograms store counts per bucket rather than values, how cumulative bucket counts make merging trivial, and what linear interpolation inside a bucket assumes about the distribution. observability
- May 4, 2024 Exponential Histograms and the Mergeable Bucket Layout How boundaries derived from a growth factor give uniform relative error, why an offset and a scale factor are enough to merge two histograms, and where the resolution limits sit. observability
- Apr 28, 2024 Quantiles from Finite Samples and Their Confidence Bands What a p99 computed from a few hundred observations actually estimates, how the order statistic maps to a binomial interval, and why tail claims need sample sizes that frequently do not exist. performance engineering
- Jul 7, 2023 Aggregation Laws: Which Metric Operations Commute Why sums, counts, minimums and maximums survive regrouping while averages and percentiles do not, and how the order of rate and sum changes the answer. observability
- May 13, 2023 Low-Volume Objectives and the Distortion of Counting Qualifiers Why a 99.9% target on a few hundred requests a day cannot be estimated from the data, and how qualifier counting and aggregation windows change the answer. observability