Measure API endpoint latency

Latency is the time it takes for a request to travel from the client to the server and back; the time it takes for a request to be sent and received. Latency is usually measured in seconds or milliseconds (ms). The lower the latency, the faster the response time.

Latency is an essential metric to monitor in real-time applications. Read on to learn how latency is measured in Tinybird, and how to monitor and visualize the latency of your API endpoints when data is being retrieved.

How latency is measured

When measuring latency in an end-to-end application, you consider data ingestion, data transformation, and data retrieval. In Tinybird, latency is measured as the time it takes for a request to be sent, and the response to be sent back to the client.

When calling an API endpoint, you can check this metric defined as elapsed in the statistics object of the response:

Statistics object within an example Tinybird API endpoint call
{
  "meta": [ ... ],
  "data": [ ... ],
  "rows": 10,
  "statistics": {
    "elapsed": 0.001706275,
    "rows_read": 10,
    "bytes_read": 180
  }
}

Monitor latency

To monitor the latency of your API endpoints, use the pipe_stats_rt and pipe_stats Service data sources:

  • pipe_stats_rt consists of the real-time statistics of your API endpoints, and has a duration field that encapsulates the latency time in seconds.
  • pipe_stats contains the aggregated statistics of your API endpoints by date, and presents a avg_duration_state field which is the average duration of the API endpoint by day in seconds.

Because the avg_duration_state field is an intermediate state, you'd need to merge it when querying the data source using something like avgMerge.

For details on building pipes and endpoints that monitor the performance of your API endpoints using the pipe_stats_rt and pipe_stats data sources, follow the API endpoint performance guide.

Visualize latency

In your workspace, go to Time Series and select Endpoint performance to visualize the latency of your API endpoints over time.

Next steps

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