RED-METHOD

Three service metrics: R, E, D.

Definition

RED: Rate counted in req/sec, Errors as percentage of failed reqs, Duration as p50/p95/p99 histogram. Complementary to USE method (Brendan Gregg, 2013) for resources. Standard Grafana SRE dashboard.

Origin

Concept introduced by Tom Wilkie at OSCON Texas 2017 ; popularised by Grafana Labs.

Example in context

An EDI Receiver service exports 3 Prometheus metrics: http_requests_total, http_errors_total, http_request_duration_seconds — RED.

Related terms

• USE — resource complement.