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Section 1 · Labeling and cardinality fundamentals

Overview of the Design a labeling strategy to control cardinality journey

Estimated time: 1 min

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