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Naming Metrics

A metric is identified by a unique name, which is composed of namespaces separated by periods (.) which are used to display the collection of series into a hierarchical tree.

A series storing system load average on a server called nginx-2 in data center eu-west-1a might be named as eu-west-1a.nginx-2.system.load_average

The way you choose to structure your metric names will have a bearing on the groupings you use in alerts so try to think about the system being monitored and the categories you would like to alert on. These categories should form namespaces in your metric names.

Characters allowed in metric names:

  • Ascii uppercase
  • Ascii lowercase
  • digits
  • These Special characters '+', '-', '%', '.', '_', '/', '=', ':'