In computer performance, we’re especially concerned about latency outliers: very slow database queries, application requests, disk I/O, etc. The term “outlier” is subjective: there is no rigid mathematical definition. From [Grubbs 69]:
An outlying observation, or “outlier,” is one that appears to deviate markedly from other members of the sample in which it occurs.
Outliers are commonly detected by comparing the maximum value in a data set to a custom threshold, such as 50 or 100 ms for disk I/O. This requires the metric to be well understood beforehand, as is usually the case for application latency and other key metrics. However, we are also often faced with a large number of unfamiliar metrics, where we don’t know the thresholds in advance.
There are a number of …
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