In the context of the OWIN Framework analytics refers to writing middleware that gathers information at run-time about the internal operation of the middleware and makes this information available to tools, applications and other middleware.

Some examples of the kind of information that middleware might gather is: number of requests processed per minute, average time taken to process particular types of request, ratio of requests that are anonymous, size of cache, cache hit ratio, etc etc.

Some examples of how the analytics might be used are: display system status on a dashboard, trend key performance indicators and alert when they go outside expected range, alerting when systems are close to performance limits, elastic load balancing, tuning configuration for optimal performance, identifying system bottlenecks.