Today, most monitoring platforms still rely on an approach to metric collection that emerged about a decade ago when the first cloud-native application performance monitoring platforms emerged. They use thousands of hardwired 1:1 or 1:N endpoint technology-to-platform integrations. These integrations are most-often developed by the monitoring platform, endpoint technology providers or their customers in response to a specific request or use case. Ongoing updates to these integrations are rare—as they’re often not an R&D priority for technology providers or orphaned as community commitment fades. In order to achieve such a lofty goal, the industry must shift metric collection from a focus on flat metrics to Dimensional Data. This paper defines the core elements of Dimensional Data and demonstrates how this improved data-collection model fuels better results from next-gen analytics engines.
