---
title: Monitoring types
description: This section describes the data types used in monitoring:
component: pinggateway
version: 2026
page_id: pinggateway:reference:MonitoringTypes
canonical_url: https://docs.pingidentity.com/pinggateway/2026/reference/MonitoringTypes.html
revdate: 2025-12-11
---

# Monitoring types

This section describes the data types used in monitoring:

* Counter

  Cumulative metric for a numerical value that only increases.

* Gauge

  Metric for a numerical value that can increase or decrease.

* Summary

  Metric that samples observations, providing a count of observations, sum total of observed amounts, average rate of events, and moving average rates across a sliding time window.

  The Prometheus view doesn't provide time-based statistics, because rates can be calculated from the time-series data. Instead, the Prometheus view includes summary metrics whose names have the following suffixes or labels:

  * `_count`: number of recorded events

  * `_sum`: total sum of recorded events

  * `{quantile="0.5"}`: 50% at or below this value

  * `{quantile="0.75"}`: 75% at or below this value

  * `{quantile="0.95"}`: 95% at or below this value

  * `{quantile="0.98"}`: 98% at or below this value

  * `{quantile="0.99"}`: 99% at or below this value

  * `{quantile="0.999"}`: 99.9% at or below this value

* Timer

  Metric combining time-series summary statistics.

  Common REST views show summaries as JSON objects. JSON summaries have the following fields:

  ```none
  {
   "max": number,             // maximum duration recorded
   "mean": number,            // total/count, or 0 if count is 0
   "min": number,             // minimum duration recorded for this metric
   "mean_rate": number,       // average rate
   "p50": number,             // 50% at or below this value
   "p75": number,             // 75% at or below this value
   "p95": number,             // 95% at or below this value
   "p98": number,             // 98% at or below this value
   "p99": number,             // 99% at or below this value
   "p999": number,            // 99.9% at or below this value
   "stddev": number,          // standard deviation of recorded durations
   "m15_rate": number,        // fifteen-minute average rate
   "m5_rate": number,         // five-minute average rate
   "m1_rate": number,         // one-minute average rate
   "duration_units": string,  // time unit used in durations
   "rate_units": string,      // event count unit and time unit used in rate
   "seconds_count": number,   // events recorded for this metric
   "count": number,           // events recorded for this metric (deprecated)
   "seconds_total": number    // sum of the durations of events recorded
   "total": number            // sum of the durations of events recorded (deprecated)
  }
  ```