---
title: "Journey overview | Grafana Labs"
description: "Overview of the Design a labeling strategy to control cardinality journey"
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

## Keep cardinality, cost, and query performance under control

Welcome to the Grafana Cloud journey that teaches you how to design a labeling strategy for your metrics and logs.

## What you’ll learn

When you complete this journey, you’ll be able to:

- Explain how label combinations multiply into unique active series and log streams
- Inspect your own cardinality with the Cardinality tab in the Cost Management and Billing app
- Choose metric labels deliberately and avoid unbounded values
- Reduce existing metrics cardinality with relabeling and Adaptive Metrics
- Decide when log data belongs in a label, in structured metadata, or in the log line
- Move high-cardinality context to the right signal instead of deleting it
- Link a metric spike to the exact trace with exemplars, without adding labels

## Journey duration

~25-35 minutes