Explore your own cardinality
The Cardinality tab in the Cost Management and Billing app shows up to 30 days of historical cardinality for your stack, highlights metrics that are new or unused, and links to remediation actions. In this milestone, you’ll open the tab and learn to read its tables.
Access to the Cardinality tab requires the grafana-cmab-app.cardinality:read permission. Refer to Manage access to the Cost Management and Billing app. If your stack is new or isn’t receiving metrics yet, the tables will be empty or sparse.
In this section, you’ll open the Cardinality tab and identify your highest-cardinality metrics and labels.
Open the Usage tab of the Cost Management and Billing app.
Select the Cardinality tab.
Review the summary stats at the top: Unique metrics, Total active series, Unique labels, and Total label value pairs. Total active series is the number your metrics bill is based on.
Scroll to the Highest cardinality metrics table. The Series column shows how many active series each metric produces, and % Total shows its share of your stack’s series count. Start your investigations here: these metrics contribute the most to cost.
Review the Highest cardinality labels table. Labels with many distinct values, such as IDs or addresses, are the multiplication factors you learned about in the previous milestone.
Check the Status column for New and Unused badges. A New badge marks a metric or label first ingested in the last 30 days, which helps you spot recently introduced cardinality. An Unused badge marks a metric that isn’t used in queries, dashboards, recording rules, or alerting rules, so it may be costing you without providing value.
Click a metric row to open the details drawer. It shows the metric’s cardinality history, a label breakdown, its query count, and the dashboards and rules that reference it. The Actions menu links to deeper analysis and remediation, including Adaptive Metrics.
Now that you’ve used the Cardinality tab to identify which metrics and labels are contributing to your active series count, ask three questions:
- Which metrics produce the most series? They’re your biggest cost levers.
- Which labels have the most unique values? They’re the multiplication factors to challenge.
- Is anything both high-cardinality and unused? That’s cost with no value, and the easiest win.
For a complete tour of the Cost Management and Billing app, including usage breakdowns and billing alerts, take the Understand billing and usage path.
In the next milestone, you’ll learn how to choose metric labels so cardinality never becomes a problem.
More to explore (optional)
At this point in your journey, you can explore the following topics: