2 min lesson
Working with heavy-tailed telemetry
Use "Working with heavy-tailed telemetry" to tell the cases apart, then choose a response for each one.
Step 1 of 3
Latency logs are not a tidy bell curve you can summarize with a mean and a standard deviation. They are heavy-tailed, multimodal, censored and polluted - and the candidate who averages them away will get caught in the technical screen.
A request that hits a warm cache returns in 40ms; the same request on a cold start with a slow tool-call takes 8 seconds. That's two populations in one column. The mean lands in the empty valley between them, describing no real request. Model the shape before you summarize it.