Metrics Glossary

Browse 98 metrics terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

98 Metrics Terms

Active Users
Users who meet a defined activity threshold within a given time window, such as daily active users or monthly active users. The exact definition varies by...
AI Hallucination Rate
A measured estimate of how often an AI system produces false, invented, or unsupported claims in a given task setup.
AI Metric
A measurement used to assess some aspect of AI system behavior, such as accuracy, latency, cost, hallucination rate, acceptance rate, or user satisfaction. AI...
Annual Recurring Revenue
The normalized yearly value of recurring subscription revenue, often used as a headline growth metric for SaaS businesses. ARR excludes one-time services and...
ARR
Annual Recurring Revenue — the annualized value of active subscriptions, the single most important metric for SaaS businesses. Calculated by multiplying MRR...
ARR Growth Rate
The rate at which annual recurring revenue increases over time, usually measured year over year or quarter over quarter. Investors use it to assess momentum...
Basis Point
One one-hundredth of a percentage point, used in finance to describe small rate or margin changes precisely. For example, 50 basis points equals 0.50...
Burndown Chart Lie
A joking phrase for a burndown chart that gives the impression of smooth progress even though the underlying work is blocked, redefined, or being gamed. It...
Burn Multiple
A capital efficiency metric calculated as net burn divided by net new ARR. A burn multiple of 1x means you spend $1 to generate $1 of new ARR (excellent)....
Churn Rate
The percentage of customers or revenue lost over a given period. Logo churn counts customers lost; revenue churn measures MRR lost. Negative net revenue churn...
Code Coverage
A metric that measures the percentage of source code executed during automated testing. While high coverage does not guarantee correctness, low coverage...
Cohort Analysis
Analyzing user behavior by grouping users who share a common starting characteristic (sign-up date, acquisition channel, plan type) and tracking their metrics...
Compound Growth
Growth that builds on prior growth so gains accumulate multiplicatively over time rather than linearly. Startups care about compounding because small rate...
Conversion Rate
The percentage of people who take a desired action out of the total who had the chance, such as visitors who sign up or leads who become customers. It is one...
Core Web Vitals
Google's three key metrics for web page user experience: LCP (Largest Contentful Paint — loading speed), INP (Interaction to Next Paint — responsiveness), and...
Counter
A variable, metric, or data structure used to track how many times something has happened or how many items exist. Counters appear in loops, rate limiting,...
CPM
Short for cost per mille, the cost of one thousand ad impressions. It is a standard metric in brand and awareness advertising.
Customer Churn
The rate at which customers stop using or paying for a product over a given time period. High customer churn can erase the benefits of strong acquisition.
Customer Health Score
A composite metric used to estimate the likelihood that a customer will retain, expand, or churn based on usage, support patterns, payment status, and other...
Customer Retention
The ability of a business to keep customers over time rather than losing them to churn. Strong customer retention is often a better sign of product-market fit...
Dashboard Culture
A team habit of centering work, decisions, and status around dashboards and visible metrics. Dashboard culture can improve alignment, but it can also encourage...
Dashboard Driven
Describing decisions made primarily from what dashboards display, sometimes wisely and sometimes with dangerous detachment from deeper system reality. In...
DAU
Daily active users, a metric counting users who meet a product's activity threshold on a given day. DAU is useful only when the definition of 'active' actually...
Delta
The difference between two states, versions, values, or outputs. Engineers use it casually for code diffs, metric movement, and change magnitude.
Drop Rate
The percentage of users or prospects who leave a process, funnel, or stage without completing the next intended action. It is often used to identify friction...
Dwell Time
Dwell Time is the amount of time an adversary remains in an environment before detection or containment. Security teams use it to enforce trust, reduce...
Engagement Metric
A quantitative measure used to track how users interact with a product, such as sessions, messages sent, projects created, or time spent. The choice of...
First Contentful Paint
A performance metric measuring the time from navigation to when the browser renders the first piece of DOM content (text, image, canvas). Signals to users that...
Goodhart's Law AI
The application of Goodhart's Law to AI systems, where optimizing heavily for a measurable proxy can degrade the true objective once the proxy becomes the...
Gross Merchandise Volume
The total value of goods or transactions sold through a marketplace or commerce platform before refunds, discounts, and take-rate adjustments as defined by the...
Growth Metric
A metric used to track whether the business is expanding in the desired way, such as new users, retention, revenue, or engagement depth. Choosing the wrong...
Growth Rate
The speed at which a business metric such as revenue, users, or bookings increases over time. Growth rate is simple to state but only meaningful when paired...
Hallucination Rate
A metric intended to capture how often an AI system produces unsupported, false, or invented content in a given evaluation setting. Hallucination rate is...
Hygiene Score
A metric intended to summarize how well an organization or device follows baseline security practices such as patching, MFA, endpoint protection, and...
Key Metric
A metric treated as especially important because it tracks a central business outcome or operating priority. Startups often fail when they confuse many...
Key Performance Indicator
A selected metric used to measure progress toward an important business objective. A useful KPI is specific enough to drive behavior and close enough to the...
KPI
Short for key performance indicator, a metric chosen to track progress toward a critical objective. Teams often overproduce KPIs when they have not made the...
KPI Theater
Performative management around key performance indicators where teams optimize dashboards, narratives, or appearances rather than underlying outcomes. The...
Largest Contentful Paint
A Core Web Vital metric measuring when the largest content element (hero image, heading, video poster) becomes visible in the viewport. Best proxy for...
Lead Time
The time it takes for work to move from request or code change to production or user delivery, often used as an engineering effectiveness metric.
Lighthouse Score Obsession
An excessive focus on improving web audit scores, sometimes at the expense of real user outcomes or broader product priorities.
Linear Growth
Growth that increases by roughly the same absolute amount each period rather than compounding. In startup settings, linear growth is often less attractive than...
Market Share
The portion of total sales, users, or volume in a market captured by a company. Market share matters more in mature or winner-take-most categories than in...
MAU
Monthly active users, the count of users who meet a defined activity threshold in a 30-day period. MAU is useful for measuring breadth of active usage, though...
Mean Time to Contain
A response metric measuring how long it takes from detection or incident start to the point where the threat is effectively isolated or prevented from causing...
Mean Time to Detect
A security operations metric measuring the average time between the start of malicious activity and when defenders detect it. Mean time to detect helps...
Mean Time to Respond
A metric measuring how long it takes an organization to begin and execute meaningful response actions after an incident is detected. Mean time to respond...
Model Metric
A metric used to measure some aspect of model behavior, such as accuracy, latency, cost, calibration, or acceptance rate. Model metrics are most useful when...
Monthly Active Users
The number of users who meet a defined activity threshold within a monthly period. Monthly active users is often the long-form expression behind the acronym...
Monthly Recurring Revenue
The normalized monthly value of recurring subscription revenue, often used as a core operating metric in SaaS businesses. MRR helps teams track momentum more...
MRR
Short for monthly recurring revenue, the normalized monthly value of recurring subscription revenue. MRR is one of the most widely tracked startup metrics...
MTBF
Mean Time Between Failures. The average time a repairable system operates between successive failures, calculated as total uptime divided by the number of...
MTTF
Mean Time To Failure. The average time a non-repairable component or system operates before it fails for the first time.
MTTR
Mean Time To Recovery (or Repair). The average elapsed time from when a failure is detected to when the system is fully restored to normal operation.
Netdata
A real-time monitoring tool for systems and applications that emphasizes live dashboards and fast setup.
Net Dollar Retention
The percentage of recurring revenue retained from existing customers over a period, accounting for expansion (upsells), contraction (downgrades), and churn....
Net MRR
Monthly recurring revenue after accounting for expansion, contraction, and churn effects, rather than just the starting base. Teams use net MRR to understand...
Net Promoter Score
A customer sentiment metric derived from asking how likely users are to recommend a product, then subtracting detractors from promoters. It is widely used but...
North Star Metric
The single metric that best captures the core value a product delivers to customers. Unlike vanity metrics (page views, downloads), the North Star Metric...
NPS
Short for Net Promoter Score, the customer-recommendation metric based on promoters minus detractors. Teams often use NPS as a simple sentiment signal, even...
Onboarding Metric
A metric specifically used to evaluate whether new users or customers are progressing successfully through setup and initial value realization. Good onboarding...
Open Rate
The percentage of delivered emails that are opened by recipients, used as a rough engagement metric in email marketing. Open-rate interpretation has become...
Perplexity Score
A language-modeling metric that measures how surprised a model is by observed text, with lower perplexity generally indicating better predictive fit.
Project Health
The overall condition of a project as reflected by factors such as maintainer activity, release cadence, issue responsiveness, contributor diversity,...
Prometheus
An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit, originally built at SoundCloud. Uses a pull-based model to scrape metrics endpoints, stores time-series...
Regression to the Mean
The statistical tendency for unusually extreme results to move closer to average over time rather than persist indefinitely. In startup metrics and hiring,...
Repository Stats
Quantitative information about a repository, such as stars, forks, commits, contributors, releases, or issue trends. In practice, repository stats are helpful...
Response Time
The time it takes to begin or complete a response action after an alert, request, or incident is recognized. In security operations, response time is a...
Retention Rate
The percentage of users or customers who remain active or paying over a specified period. Retention rate is one of the clearest indicators of product quality...
Revenue Growth
The increase in revenue over time, often measured monthly, quarterly, or annually. Revenue growth matters because it reflects commercial progress more directly...
Revenue Per User
The average amount of revenue generated per user over a defined time period. It is often used to compare monetization efficiency across segments, products, or...
Revenue Run Rate
An annualized or periodic projection based on current revenue performance, used as a shorthand estimate of what revenue would look like if the present pace...
Risk Quantification
The practice of expressing security risk in measurable terms such as expected loss, financial ranges, or modeled probabilities rather than only qualitative...
Risk Score
A numeric value intended to summarize the seriousness of a risk based on one or more contributing factors such as impact, likelihood, exposure, and...
ROI
ROI, or Return on Investment, is a financial metric that measures the profitability of an investment by comparing the gain or loss relative to its cost,...
Rule of 40
A software-company heuristic stating that revenue growth rate plus profit margin should total around 40 or more for a healthy balance of growth and efficiency....
Run Rate
A projected annualized level based on current short-term performance, such as monthly revenue multiplied forward. Run rate is useful for quick framing but can...
SaaS Metric
Any metric commonly used to understand the health of a subscription software business, such as ARR, net retention, CAC payback, gross margin, or churn. The...
SAO
Often short for sales accepted opportunity, a pipeline stage where sales formally accepts a lead or account as a legitimate opportunity worth pursuing....
SLI/SLO/SLA
Three related reliability concepts: SLI (Service Level Indicator) is the metric measured (e.g., request latency p99). SLO (Service Level Objective) is the...
Sprint Burndown Anxiety
Stress caused by watching sprint burndown charts and feeling pressure when the line does not move as management expects.
Sprint Velocity
The average number of story points (or units of work) a team completes per sprint, used for forecasting future capacity. Should stabilize over time as...
Startup Metric
Any measurement commonly used to understand startup health, such as burn, runway, activation, retention, ARR, or CAC. The phrase is generic, but in practice...
Token Count
The number of tokens present in a prompt, response, document, or full model interaction. Token count affects cost, latency, and whether a request fits within...
Token Per Second
A throughput measure showing how many tokens a model can generate each second during inference.
Total Addressable Market
The total revenue opportunity available if a product achieved 100% market share. Typically broken down into TAM (total market), SAM (Serviceable Available...
Training Loss Curve
A graph showing how training loss changes over time, used to diagnose convergence, instability, or undertraining.
Uncertainty Quantification
The formal measurement and expression of uncertainty in model outputs, predictions, or system behavior. Uncertainty quantification is important in high-stakes...
Unit Economics
The revenue and costs associated with a single unit (customer, transaction, or subscription). Key metrics: LTV (Customer Lifetime Value), CAC (Customer...
User Engagement
The depth, frequency, and quality of how users interact with a product over time. Strong user engagement usually signals that the product is becoming part of a...
User Growth
The increase in user count over time, whether measured by signups, active users, or another defined user metric. User growth becomes meaningful only when...
Validation Metric
A metric calculated on validation data to assess whether a model is improving in the ways that matter for the task. Validation metrics help teams decide when...
Velocity
In Agile/Scrum, the amount of work a team completes in a sprint, measured in story points or other units. Used for forecasting capacity, not as a performance...
Velocity Obsession
An unhealthy fixation on output speed or story points that can distort incentives and reduce code quality or long-term effectiveness.
Viral Coefficient
A metric estimating how many additional users each existing user brings in on average through invitations or sharing. When the viral coefficient is above one,...
WAU
Weekly active users, the count of users who meet a defined activity threshold within a seven-day period. WAU is useful for products whose natural usage rhythm...
Weekly Active Users
The number of users who meet an activity threshold within a weekly period. Weekly active users is the long-form expression behind the acronym WAU.
Win Rate
The percentage of opportunities or proposals that convert into closed deals. Win rate is meaningful only when qualification is disciplined enough that the...

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