Important Metric In Load Or Performance Testing

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The load testing Metrics described here are key performance indicators for your web application or web site. Response metrics show the performance measurement from a user perspective while volume metrics show the traffic generated by the load testing tool against the target web application.

Response Metrics

Average Response Time
Peak Response Time
Error Rate
Volume Measurements

Concurrent Users

Requests per Second
Throughput
An example graph of load testing metrics

There are two kinds of metrics that need to be taken into consideration:

Customer or the end user view: Most important metric is the response time (not just the server response time but also the time spent in the browsers for javascript execution, rendering, etc). This value expected can vary based on application type or even be dictated by the customer. The other metrics are concurrency of the users and the number of transactions they do per unit of time (throughput) and how the response time behaves at different levels of user concurrency and throughput.
Application/server/network view: Other metrics are related to the application/server/network etc, which is needed to to be able to support the required end-user metrics. Some of the important ones could be CPU, memory, threads, disk, etc usage on any of the servers used to serve the application, network usage, etc. However, this list of metrics can be extended a lot based on the application type and the depth of information that you want to gather and use it for better understanding of the application behavior and to better investigate into any performance issues.