A metric system for high performance counters and histograms. unlike popular metric systems today, this does not destroy the accuracy of histograms by sampling. instead, a logarithmic bucketing function compresses values, generally within 1% of their true value (although between 0 and 1 the precision loss may not be within this boundary). this allows for extreme compression, which allows us to calculate arbitrarily high percentiles with no loss of accuracy - just a small amount of precision. this is particularly useful for highly-clustered events that are tolerant of a small precision loss, but for which you really care about what the tail looks like, such as measuring latency across a distributed system.