What Is the Traffic Golden Signal?

The traffic golden signal quantifies the level of demand on a service, commonly as requests per second or transactions per second, and is one of the four golden signals. It describes how busy the system is at a given moment. Other signals like latency and errors are interpreted relative to this load.

Why it matters

A latency or error change means little without knowing the traffic behind it. Traffic provides the denominator and context that make the other signals interpretable.

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