The difference between a Metric and a Data Stream or Metric Stream

A metric is a collection of measurements that facilitates the quantification of some particular characteristic. Examples of metrics are: requests/second serviced by an application, CPU load, stock price, temperature, number of website visits, customer churn rate, etc.

Metric streams

An data stream aka metric stream is a metric reporting at a specific interval from a given source. For example CPU reporting at 60s resolution from 100 servers is one unique metric name with 100 sources which constitutes 100 metric streams.