Circonus Opensources Its Powerful, Patented Histogram Technology

Original title "Circonus Contributes its Powerful, Patented Histogram Technology to the Open Source Community" (was a few characters too long).

"Major contribution creates vendor-neutral industry standard for the interoperability, mergeability, and seamless analysis of histogram telemetry"

"Histograms are a data structure that allows users to model the distribution of a set of samples – for example, the age of every human on earth. But instead of storing each sample as its own record, they are grouped together in “buckets” or “bins” which allows for significant data compression and thus superior economics. This compression of data allows for extraordinary metric transmission and ingestion rates, high frequency, real-time analytics, and economical long-term storage. Histograms are also particularly useful in handling the breadth and depth of metric data produced by container technologies such as Kubernetes.

The key to solving the interoperability and mergeability challenges of histograms is in the definition of the bin sizes or “boundaries.” Without standard bin sizes, there is no way to merge histograms together without introducing significant error that carries into the subsequent analysis of the data."

https://openhistogram.io/

https://github.com/circonus-labs/libcircllhist