Observability Metrics Overview

Observability Metrics provide insight into the health, performance, and behavior of Retarus services by exposing aggregated metrics that can be consumed by observability platforms. These metrics support monitoring, analysis, and alerting without requiring access to raw event data.

Observability platforms help organizations understand how applications, services, and infrastructure behave in real time. They collect and analyze telemetry data such as logs, metrics, events, and traces.

Gartner defines observability platforms as tools that provide deep, real-time visibility into system behavior. By analyzing telemetry data, these platforms enable both humans and automated systems to detect and address issues before they impact customers.

Observability Metrics focus on structured, time-based measurements that support dashboards, trend analysis, capacity planning, and threshold-based alerting.

Retarus Observability Metrics

Retarus provides Observability Metrics in the Prometheus exposition format, a widely adopted, text-based standard designed for efficient ingestion and processing.

The metrics consist of aggregated counters and timers rather than individual events. This approach reduces data volume while still providing meaningful insight into system performance and operational patterns.

For advanced use cases, metrics can be accessed through a Retarus-provided metrics endpoint and integrated into customer-managed observability platforms. This enables additional customization, fine-tuning, and extended analysis.

All supported products expose metrics using the same standardized format. Product-specific documentation describes available metrics, endpoints, authentication, and configuration details.

Benefits and supported platforms

Observability Metrics provide the following benefits:

Real-time visibility into system behavior
Standardized, ready-to-ingest metrics format
Integration into existing observability and monitoring platforms
Support for dashboards, alerts, and trend analysis
Low data volume due to aggregated metrics

Observability Metrics integrate with popular monitoring platforms such as Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, Dynatrace, Elastic, and New Relic. Most platforms that support Prometheus-compatible metrics should be able to consume the exposed data.

Observability Metrics FAQ

How long are metrics stored in the Retarus Observability Metrics instance?

Retarus retains metrics data for 45 days.

In which format are the metrics provided?

Retarus provides metrics in the Prometheus exposition format, a text-based format designed for readability and parsing. Prometheus also supports the OpenMetrics format, which extends the Prometheus text format with additional metadata capabilities.

Are there limitations on query complexity or time ranges?

You define scrape intervals in your Prometheus configuration. The minimum allowed scrape interval is 1 minute. Using shorter intervals does not provide fresher metrics.

How much data volume should be expected?

Data volume depends on the configured scrape frequency. The expected number of metric values per scrape varies by product and configuration. For example, Transactional Email provides approximately 30–50 metric values per technical account for each scrape. Because the metrics are aggregated counters and timers, overall data volume remains minimal across all products.

Product-specific documentation

Observability Metrics are supported by multiple Retarus products. While the data format and access model remain consistent, endpoints, available metrics, labels, and configuration steps differ by product.

For product-specific information, refer to: