Data Optimization Technique: Convert Events to Metrics

As described in the Mezmo White Paper Optimize Your Telemetry Data in Five Steps, a common technique to reduce the data volume being sent to your storage or observability solutions is to convert events to metrics. This is especially useful when the important information about the event is not contained in the event message itself, but in the number of those events that occur over a defined time period.

In this example, the Event-to-Metric module is used to convert 200-OK events to metrics. During the normal functioning of a system, these events can make up as much as 50% of the total data volume, but don't tell us much about the health of the system other than it's functioning normally. By converting these events to metrics before sending them to an observability tool, you can more easily see fluctuations in the number of 200-OK events as indicators of system health.