Your Histogram Is Lying to You. Here’s the Truth.
Histograms are lying to you. They hide outliers and distort the shape of your data through arbitrary bins. The empirical cumulative distribution function (eCDF) plots every point in order, revealing the true tail behavior without artifacts. For latency, error rates, or any metric where outliers are the signal, switching to eCDF changes what you think you know about your data. It’s time to unlearn the default.