The normal distribution is useful to understand the probability density of a large sample data set. There are many real world application of this theory. The example in this article shows how this can be used for analyzing the CPU usage of a particular process or individual core or overall CPU usage over a period of time. There may be occasional spikes up to 100%, but that may not necessarily an indicator of an issue for the overall system as long as the normal operating mode is utilizing less than the threshold.   A graphical representation of probability density distribution combined with cumulative distribution will help to visualize the overall usage.   Probability density function is represented as    The above simplifies to:     - Standard deviation    - Mean   This can be implemented in a programming language, I've used javascript and DyGraph chart library to create visualization of the data.   Sample data set:  var testData = [2,0,95.9,37.9,55.9,71.9,69.9,7...