Analytics Overview
Analytics is where you stop describing your system and start interrogating it. The simulator already runs your design step by step (see Runtime → Engine Methodology for how that works). Analytics is the layer that turns runtime data into answers.
When to reach for which view
Section titled “When to reach for which view”| Question you’re asking | Open this |
|---|---|
| ”Does my design even work under expected load?” | Stress Testing |
| ”Where is my latency budget going?” | Timeline View (Pro) |
| “How does this design hold up across many random seeds?” | Monte Carlo (Pro) |
| “Is health stable over time, or drifting?” | Stability Analysis (Pro) |
| “What’s the right value for this capacity / service rate?” | Parameter Sweep (Pro) |
How they relate
Section titled “How they relate”Stress Testing is the foundation. Every other analytics view runs on top of the same deterministic engine — they just slice the resulting data differently:
- Stress Testing — single run, single seed, you manually adjust load / faults / latency. Read the bottleneck, fix, re-run. Free for everyone.
- Timeline View — same run, re-rendered along a time axis. The longest bar IS the bottleneck. Spine sub-mode for storytelling, Gantt sub-mode for diagnosing. Pro.
- Monte Carlo — same design, run N times with varied seeds, aggregate the distribution. Answers “is my P95 healthy, not just my median?” Pro.
- Stability Analysis — same single run, scored frame-by-frame for consistency. Catches drift / oscillation that average metrics miss. Pro.
- Parameter Sweep — Monte Carlo across a 1D or 2D grid of behavior knobs. Heatmap output. Answers “what’s the optimal value?” instead of “is THIS value good?” Pro.
Workflow
Section titled “Workflow”The typical analytics loop:
- Stress test first. Hit your design with realistic load. Read the bottleneck.
- Open Timeline View to see where the time goes. Critical path highlighted in red.
- Fix the worst offender in Topology view. Bump capacity, add a queue, swap behavior.
- Re-stress. Verify the fix actually moved the bottleneck.
- Once it looks good on one seed: open Monte Carlo to confirm it holds across variation.
- If a metric is sensitive to a single knob: Parameter Sweep finds the right value without guesswork.
- For long-running systems: check Stability Analysis to make sure health is consistent over time, not just averaging out to “okay.”
Each tool answers a different question. Don’t reach for Monte Carlo when you haven’t run Stress Testing once. Don’t run Parameter Sweep blind — let Stress Testing tell you which knob matters first.