Reduce metrics cardinality you already have
If the Cardinality tab already shows high-cardinality or unused metrics, you don’t have to reinstrument anything to fix it. Adaptive Metrics reduces cardinality from inside Grafana Cloud by aggregating away the labels nobody uses, while keeping the metric itself.
How Adaptive Metrics helps
Adaptive Metrics analyzes how your organization uses its metrics across dashboards, alerts, recording rules, and queries. It then recommends aggregating underutilized metrics into lower-cardinality versions. Applying a recommendation doesn’t delete the metric, rather it aggregates away unused label dimensions, and your existing dashboards, rules, and queries continue to work without modification. If usage changes later, you can remove the aggregation and the metric is stored at full cardinality again.
Unnecessary series are stopped before they’re persisted, without modifying your collector configuration.
In this section, you’ll use Adaptive Metrics to review recommendations for your stack.
In the navigation menu, expand Adaptive Telemetry. If the section is already expanded, skip this step.
Navigate to Adaptive Metrics and click the Metrics tab.
Scroll down to review the recommendations table. Each recommendation shows which metric it affects and which labels it proposes to aggregate away, based on how the metric is actually used.
Click a recommendation to review its details before applying it. This includes the recommended rule information and the metric’s usage stats.
The recommended order to remediate cardinality:
- Address unused metrics. Metrics with the Unused badge in the Cardinality tab add cost with no value.
- Assess high-cardinality labels on used metrics. Aggregate away the label dimensions nobody queries, and keep the ones they do.
- Protect what matters. Define exemptions for metrics that must never be aggregated.
For the complete Adaptive Metrics workflow, including rules, exemptions, segmentation, and auto-apply, take the Optimize metrics with Adaptive Metrics path.
In the next milestone, you’ll switch signals and apply labeling strategy to logs.
More to explore (optional)
At this point in your journey, you can explore the following topics: