Optimize your metrics with Adaptive Metrics
Welcome to the Grafana learning journey that shows you how to use Adaptive Metrics to automatically analyze and reduce unused or high-cardinality metrics. You’ll learn how to review and apply recommendations, define your own aggregation or drop rules, and set exemptions for the metrics that matter most to your dashboards and alerts. Adaptive Metrics improves performance and lowers cost by continuously analyzing your metric usage—letting you automate what’s routine while staying in full control of the critical parts of your observability data.
Here’s what to expect
When you complete this journey, you’ll be able to:
- Navigate to Adaptive Metrics and understand its core interface
- Analyze current metric usage and identify high-cardinality and unused metrics
- Review and apply system recommendations to reduce cardinality
- Define aggregation and drop rules to tailor optimization
- Create exemptions to protect critical or compliance-bound metrics
- Segment metrics by team or service for focused management
- Enable auto-apply for hands-off, continuous optimization
- Monitor and validate time series reductions over time
Before you begin
Before you start, ensure you have:
- A Grafana Cloud account. Refer to Grafana Cloud.
- Metrics ingested into Grafana Cloud using Prometheus or OpenTelemetry with metadata preserved.
- Basic familiarity with Grafana dashboards, alerts, and Prometheus-style metric names and labels.
- An understanding of metric cardinality and how labels affect storage and performance.
Troubleshooting
If you get stuck, we’ve got your back! Where appropriate, troubleshooting information is just a click away.
Are you ready?