What are Metrics?

Metrics are the most important part of micro stat, they represent the data you send from your app.
In your app when you find something you want to measure, you write code to create a metric.

A name: provided by you so it is recognisable
A type: The purpose of the Metric, for example is it measuring time taken or representing a number.

Every time you publish a Metric, you provide a value - In the Dashboard we call this a Data Point.
Over time you will publish many Data Points, so we show the values of these in Graphs on our Dashboard to let you see how it is trending over time.

There are many use cases for what Metrics you might want to publish in your app, here is one example to explain the concept.
We might create a Metric called "Page Load Time" and give it the type "Timer"
Every time we load a page in our app, we can publish the metric with a value showing how long it took. IE 100 milliseconds.
Then in the Dashboard we can view the Metric and see how long it takes our users to load the pages in our app.
If the outcome is positive; we can set thresholds to track it and keep it performing well
If the outcome is not so good you can make improvements to your app and monitor how the data changes over time.

We have a seperate document listing all of the supported metric types - Check it out