Previously, in Why Histograms? and Histograms vs Summaries, I went over the basics of histograms and summaries, explaining the tradeoffs, benefits, and limitations of each. Because they’re easy to understand and demonstrate, those posts focused on so-called explicit bucket histograms. The exponential bucket histogram, also referred to as native histogram in Prometheus, is a low-cost, efficient alternative to explicit bucket histograms. In this post, I go through what they are, how they work...
