Destination reached!

Congratulations on completing this journey! Job well done!

Throughout this journey, you have:

• Learned how label combinations multiply into unique active series and log streams, and that this is what you’re billed for
• Explored your own stack’s cardinality with the Cardinality tab in the Cost Management and Billing app
• Learned the rules for metric labels: bounded values only, added only when queried, and audited at ingestion setup
• Reviewed Adaptive Metrics recommendations to reduce cardinality you already have
• Applied the logs decision framework: labels for origin, structured metadata for high-cardinality fields, filter expressions for the rest
• Learned to correlate signals so high-cardinality detail lives on logs and traces, not metric labels

Keep the two questions from this path in your team’s review habits: Is this label value bounded? and Will anyone query by it? Most cardinality problems never happen when someone asks those questions at instrumentation time.

More to explore (optional)

Continue your cost management journey by exploring:

• Understand billing and usage
• Optimize metrics with Adaptive Metrics
• Optimize logs with Adaptive Logs