Over the past few weeks, the Camp Fire in Northern California and the Woolsey Fire in Southern California have devastated people and property. There has been tragic loss of life in the town of Paradise, and California’s firefighters remain tasked, once again, with the difficult job of containing and extinguishing the flames. What no one can contain, though, is the spread of hazardous wildfire smoke.

We’ve recently pushed out several exciting improvements to Circonus. With this release, you can expect the following improvements.

A “metric” is a measurement, or value, representing the operational state of your system at a given time. For example, the amount of free memory on a web host, or the number of users logged into your site at a given time. Factor in hundreds (or thousands) of hosts, availability zones, hardware batches, or service endpoints, and you’re suddenly dealing with a significant logistical challenge.

Percentiles have become one of the primary service level indicators to represent real systems monitoring performance. When used correctly, they provide a robust metric that can be used for base-of-mission critical service level objectives. However, there’s a reason for the “when used correctly” above.