There's also a lot of alarm bells going on when you have reports of averages without reports of medians (quartiles, percentiles) and variance. Or even better: some kind of analysis of the distribution. A lot of data will be closer to a Poisson-process or have multi-modality, and the average is generally hiding that detail.
What can happen is that you typically process requests around 10ms but you have a few outliers at 2500ms. Now the average is going to be somewhere between 10ms and 2500ms. If you have two modes, then the average can often end up in the middle of nowhere, say at 50ms. Yet you have 0 requests taking 50ms. They take either 10 or 2500.
There's also a lot of alarm bells going on when you have reports of averages without reports of medians (quartiles, percentiles) and variance. Or even better: some kind of analysis of the distribution. A lot of data will be closer to a Poisson-process or have multi-modality, and the average is generally hiding that detail.
What can happen is that you typically process requests around 10ms but you have a few outliers at 2500ms. Now the average is going to be somewhere between 10ms and 2500ms. If you have two modes, then the average can often end up in the middle of nowhere, say at 50ms. Yet you have 0 requests taking 50ms. They take either 10 or 2500.