The following key concepts and terms are used throughout the monitoring documentation.

Core concepts

• Service. An Akamai Cloud service that produces operational data, such as Linodes, Object Storage, or Databases.
• Entity. An object that can be monitored, such as a compute instance, container, or database cluster.
• Region. A geographic location where workloads run, or where operational data is collected or delivered.
• Workload. A deployable or runnable unit of work—for example, an application—that generates observable behavior over time.

Metrics concepts

• Metric. A numerical measurement collected from a cloud service at regular, defined intervals to track service health, performance, or operational trends.
• Dimension. A descriptive attribute attached to a metric that adds context and enables filtering or grouping, for example, the region where a service is running.
• Dashboard. A visual representation of key metrics that shows how a service is performing over time.
• Widget. A dashboard component that displays time series metric data in chart and table form.
• Aggregation function. A mathematical operation such as average, sum, minimum, or maximum used to combine metric data points over a defined time period.
• Aggregation interval. The time interval over which metric data points are aggregated.

Alerts concepts

• Alert. An event generated when alert criteria are met.
• Alert definition A configuration that specifies an alert's properties as well as the evaluation criteria that determines when the alert fires.
• System alert. A predefined alert automatically generated by the system to notify users of significant or critical conditions impacting one or more entities.
• User alert. An alert that fires when user-configured evaluation criteria are met.
• Notification. A message sent when an alert's evaluation criteria are met. Email notifications are currently supported.
• Notification channel. The method used to deliver alert notifications. Email is currently supported.