Role of Power Metric and LPF in AGC(Automatic Gain Controller) I am trying to understand &amp; implement simple toy AGC system . Few questions while reading about it,

1) How POWER metric came into picture, why not other metric like absolute value to control amplitude of input signal?

2) What's the role of LPF(Low Pass Filter) in AGC? LPF is an attenuator or blocker to high frequency components. How such filtering effect can control input amplitudes?

Any reading references will be helpful.
Either power or rms value is typically used for AGC as a peak value would be much more variable given it is an instantaneous measurement. The low pass filter typically refers to the Loop Filter (and if so, would be better described as such as it more typically done as an integrator) which is a core part of the control loop design. A band pass filter prior to the power detector is also important since any signals within the bandwidth of the filter/detector would control the AGC level. 

Below are example block diagrams depicting typical AGC implementations in the analog and digital domain.  The log and alog interfaces for the digital implementation provide consistent loop bandwidth over the operational range of the AGC due to using multipliers for the gain adjust. 





Further AGC considerations for digital implementation are covered in this post: How to adjust receiver gains to avoid saturation and quantization noise to optimise post digital processing?