---
title: "Measure what each machine uses · Agent Wranglers"
url: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/metrics-and-traces/resource-metrics
updated: 2026-10-20
licence: "All rights reserved"
---

# Measure what each machine uses

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

- Level: Recommended
- Chapter: [Metrics and traces](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/metrics-and-traces)
- Rule: For every server and database, record how busy each resource is, how much work waits, and its errors.
- How: Collect CPU, memory, disk space, disk wait and network for each host, for example with node_exporter or the OpenTelemetry host metrics receiver. Add connection pools, queue lengths and the database. Brendan Gregg calls this the USE method, for utilization, saturation and errors.
- Check: A dashboard shows CPU, memory, disk and queue length for every host and the database, with no gaps in the last day.

**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/resource-metrics`.

- Previous: [Keep metric labels few and bounded](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/metrics-and-traces/bounded-metric-labels)
- Next: [Trace requests across services](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/metrics-and-traces/distributed-tracing)
- [Metrics and traces](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/metrics-and-traces)