Understanding the most common statistical methods
Statistics is a section of the applied mathematics discipline. It’s used to analyze and infer conclusions from quantitative datasets. Statistical methods are largely used to understand data points and how they correlate to each other. This is exactly what SREs need to have in their skill set for the observability data.
This is a vast knowledge area that we will only scratch the surface of in this book. We want to give enough information to start using statistical methods in daily activities. We will divide the contents of this subject into four sections:
- Percentages
- Mean, average, and standard deviation
- Quantile and percentiles
- Histograms
We will do a quick tour of the statistics world next.
Percentages
Simply put, the percentage is a ratio measurement expressed as a fraction of 100. It represents a real number from 0 to 1 as a portion within 0 and 100 percent. It’s perhaps the most...
