A histogram is a graphical representation of the distribution of numerical data. It's essentially a bar chart, where each bar represents a range of values, and the height of the bar corresponds to the frequency of data points within that range.
For example, if you have a dataset of response times for a web application, a histogram can show you how many requests fall into different time intervals, such as 0-100ms, 100-200ms, and so on.
Histograms are useful in observability because they enable you to quickly understand the shape of the data and identify patterns or anomalies. A histogram of number of errors can quickly show you that errors spiked at a specific time and how the number of errors recovered after that.
Explore related concepts
Wide event
A wide event is a comprehensive data structure that contains all relevant details of a particular request or transaction within a single event, rather than distributing them across multiple events or logs.
Canonical logs
Canonical logs are logs you add at the end of every request or transaction. Each of these logs contains all the important parameters about the request, for instance, user ID, duration, response status code, etc. Adding all these details in a single log line enable you to debug faster and perform more complex aggregations without the need to join multiple log lines together.
Logging
Logging is the process of recording events, actions, or messages that occur within an application, typically for troubleshooting or analysis purposes.