What Is the USE Method?

The USE method is a systematic approach that, for each resource, examines its utilization, saturation, and errors. Walking every significant resource such as CPU, memory, disk, and network through these three questions quickly localizes bottlenecks. It complements request-centric methods by focusing on the system side rather than the workload.

Why it matters

When a service is slow but its request metrics look fine, the cause is often a constrained resource. The USE checklist offers a fast, structured way to find which resource is the limit.

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