---
title: "Where the mistakes happen | Grafana Labs"
description: "Cardinality problems usually enter a stack at ingestion setup"
---

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

## Where the mistakes happen

Cardinality problems usually enter a stack at ingestion setup, not in application code reviews. Enabling an integration with an app or service with default settings, such as the Kubernetes Monitoring Helm chart across all your clusters, can turn on thousands of metrics and labels at once. That visibility is valuable, but only if your budget expects it. When you set up a new integration:

- Review what metrics the defaults send before pushing them to production.
- Use allowlists to keep only the metrics and labels you’ll use.
- Check the **Cardinality** tab after enabling anything new, and watch for **New** badges.