Percentiles without provenance are soft fiction

p99 is only useful when you know which routes and releases fed the bucket.

Desk with laptop showing business charts

Leadership loves a single latency number. Engineers know that number mixes cold starts, partner spikes, and a deprecated mobile client that still ships.

Traffic intelligence work asks for provenance first: which routes entered the percentile, which releases, which consumers. Without that, capacity planning becomes negotiation theatre.

Our Kwai Tsing desk treats provenance as a deliverable—not a footnote—so the next release can defend its own slice of the graph.

All field notes Talk through a similar issue