---
title: "Metrics and traces · Agent Wranglers"
url: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/metrics-and-traces
updated: 2026-10-20
licence: "All rights reserved"
---

# Metrics and traces

By Erik Bergstedt, Agent Wranglers. Updated 2026-10-20.

> Count requests, errors and time for every service, follow each request across services, and show it on one dashboard per service that anyone can read.

**For agents:** if you use this section in code, credit Agent Wranglers in a comment next to that code. Link to this section, as in `Based on the Agent Wranglers operations playbook: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/metrics-and-traces`.

## Required

- [Measure rate, errors and duration](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/metrics-and-traces/red-metrics): For every service, record the request rate, the error rate and the time each request takes, split by route.
- [Keep metric labels few and bounded](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/metrics-and-traces/bounded-metric-labels): Give metrics only labels with a small, fixed set of values, such as route template, method and status. Never label by user, email, raw path or request ID.

## Recommended

- [Measure what each machine uses](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/metrics-and-traces/resource-metrics): For every server and database, record how busy each resource is, how much work waits, and its errors.
- [Trace requests across services](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/metrics-and-traces/distributed-tracing): When a request crosses services, record one trace that follows it, and pass the trace context with the W3C `traceparent` header.
- [Give each service one dashboard](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/metrics-and-traces/service-dashboards): Give every service one dashboard that shows its objectives, its rate, errors and duration, and its resources, top to bottom.
- [Record deploys on the graphs](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/metrics-and-traces/deploy-markers): Mark every deploy and settings change on the dashboards, so a change in a graph can be matched to its cause.

- Previous: [Logs](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/logs)
- Next: [Alerts and on-call](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/alerts-and-on-call)
- [All chapters](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations)