The documentation of CM metrics for HBase Master states the below: """ The number of times the balancer was invoked outside a balance cluster operation. The balancer might be invoked when a new table is created, for example, to place the newly created regions. """ - https://www.cloudera.com/documentation/enterprise/latest/topics/cm_metrics_master.html If you want more granularity on when this metric receives an increment, look for the method calls named 'incrMiscInvocations' inside the balancer base class within HBase Master: https://github.com/cloudera/hbase/blob/cdh5.15.0-release/hbase-server/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/master/balancer/BaseLoadBalancer.java -- The _across_masters suffix just averages the value across all HBase Masters running in the cluster. The _across_roletype generally applies the same way to all other role type metrics in CM. You can also query them without the across suffixes. The total_ prefix sums instead of averaging the value, across all relevant role types for your chosen metric. The rate bit basically appears for all counter style metrics. It represents the change over time (dx/dt). You can perform an integral(…) over any rate-named metrics to access actual value growth. These are tsquery specifics documented further at https://www.cloudera.com/documentation/enterprise/latest/topics/cm_dg_metric_aggregation.html#cmug_topic_11_8 ... View more