Analyzing metrics usage with cardinality management dashboards

Grafana Cloud’s Pro and Advanced tiers include the ability to explore the cardinality of the metrics and labels stored inside of Grafana Cloud Metrics using a set of cardinality management dashboards.

These dashboards allow you to visualize the distribution of metrics and labels across your active time series stored in Grafana Cloud Metrics. See Active series and DPM for the definition of an active series.

Limitations

• Cardinality analysis dashboards only display data for metrics and labels within a single stack.
• The cardinality dashboards only work with default (provisioned by Grafana Cloud at the creation of a stack or org) Grafana Coud Prometheus data sources.

Dashboards

Grafana Cloud provides provides several, provisioned-by-default dashboards that allow you to visualize and explore the data. To find the dashboards:

1. Go to Dashboard -> Browse in Grafana Cloud
2. Filter by the cardinality-management tag

Cardinality management - overview dashboard

This dashboard provides a summary of the highest cardinality metrics and labels in the selected datasource.

Cardinality management - metrics dashboard

This dashboard helps you understand the cardinality of an individual metric. At the top of the dashboard, you can select which metric you want to explore. The dashboard will highlight the labels attached to that metric that have the most values.

Cardinality management - labels dashboard

This dashboard breaks down an individual label. For a given label name, it shows you which label values are attached to the most series. It also shows you the highest cardinality metrics for a given label<>value pair.