---
title: "Cardinality affects cost and performance | Grafana Labs"
description: "How high cardinality affects metrics cost, logs cost, and query performance"
---

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

## Cardinality affects cost and performance

High cardinality affects both your bill and query performance, but metrics and logs are billed differently.

- **Metrics cost:** Grafana Cloud bills metrics on active series, so every unique label combination is a billing unit, whether or not anyone queries it.
- **Logs cost:** Grafana Cloud bills logs on GB processed and ingested, not per stream. High stream cardinality doesn’t add a direct per-stream charge, but it can inflate query costs because larger indexes and more chunks mean bigger scans.
- **Performance:** For logs, many streams mean a large index and many small chunks, which slows queries down. Loki, the Grafana Cloud Logs backend, is designed for low-cardinality labels and limits index labels to 15 by default.

High-cardinality attributes to watch for include user IDs, request or trace IDs, IP addresses, Kubernetes pod names, and timestamps. Any of these used as a label value creates a new series or stream for every unique value.