Grafana Labs has announced broader public access to Adaptive Metrics in Grafana Cloud. The feature uses information about metrics usage to identify data that can be aggregated.
The same update expands Cardinality Management dashboards, helping teams distinguish between metrics used by queries, dashboards or alerts and metrics that are rarely used.
Why cardinality matters
A large number of label combinations can generate many distinct time series. That can increase the cost of collecting and retaining metrics even when application traffic has not changed much.
Before aggregating data, teams should check the alerts and investigations that depend on it. The goal is a useful observability setup, rather than deleting detail solely to reach a smaller bill.