An audit record reports how many messages are sitting in a process’s outbound queue right now — a figure that rises as work arrives and falls as it drains. Which metric type is that?
An audit record reports how many messages are sitting in a process’s outbound queue right now — a figure that rises as work arrives and falls as it drains. Which metric type is that?
Answer
gauge
Options - A. gauge - B. counter - C. interval timer - D. resource utilization Why - A. Correct — a gauge measures a level, and a level rises and falls. Queued messages and assigned connections are both levels. - B. The near-miss, and the one that decides the question: a counter is incremented but never decremented until reset, so it cannot represent a quantity that falls when a message is dequeued. - C. An interval timer measures a duration between two related events, not a level at an instant. - D. Resource utilization is a quantity consumed over a stated period — a total across a window, not the current value of anything. One test separates gauge from counter: can the number go down? These four metric types are EXT — earlier editions and the IDES literature — so cite them there, never to the fifth edition.
Stallings & Brown 5e ch18 §18.1–18.5; RFC 4949; RFC 3164; ITU-T X.816; NIST SP 800-92