Business metrics

Business metrics connect technical health to product outcomes: signups completed, payments captured, jobs processed, carts abandoned. They help answer "are users succeeding?" when servers look green but revenue drops.

| Example | Why it matters | |---------|----------------| | checkout_completed_total | Revenue path health | | signup_verified_total | Funnel integrity | | background_job_failures | Async workflow reliability |

					metrics.increment('payment_succeeded', { plan: 'pro' });
metrics.increment('payment_failed', { reason: 'card_declined' });
				

Define metrics with product and support teams. Keep labels low-cardinality (plan tier, region)—not raw user IDs. Pair business drops with RED on the same workflow.

On interviews: choosing SLIs from business events, avoiding PII in labels, and detecting silent partial failures.

Common pitfalls: only infrastructure metrics during outages; unbounded label sets; business metrics without ownership or dashboards.

The trade-off is product-aligned alerting versus harder instrumentation and cross-team agreement.

Checklist:

• Name metrics after user-visible outcomes.
• Keep labels bounded and non-PII.
• Dashboard business + technical together.
• Review metrics when flows change.