---
title: "The value of Adaptive Metrics | Grafana Labs"
description: "Understand how Adaptive Metrics helps you control costs, improve performance, and maintain observability quality as your environment grows."
---

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

# The value of Adaptive Metrics

As your observability footprint grows, metric data can multiply fast — often faster than you need it to.

Adaptive Metrics is enabled by default, continuously analyzing your metric usage in the background to find optimization opportunities.

This helps you:

- Lower ingestion and storage costs
- Speed up dashboards and queries
- Maintain observability quality as your environment grows
- Automate ongoing optimization to prevent metric sprawl

You can arrive at Adaptive Metrics from different Grafana workflows depending on the problem you’re trying to solve.

No matter where you begin, this journey shows how to analyze and optimize metrics, so you keep only the data that delivers value.

## Common entry points

Expand table

| Problem                                                                             | Entry Point                   | Why Use Adaptive Metrics                                                            |
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|-------------------------------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| You see a spike in metric ingestion or cost, or receive a Billing & Usage alert | Cost Management & Billing | Identify which metrics drive the increase and reduce redundant series to lower cost |
| Dashboards take too long to load, or Explore queries time out                       | Dashboards or Explore         | Find and optimize high-cardinality metrics causing performance issues               |
| Alerts or SLO tracking seem noisy or unstable                                       | Alerting or SLOs              | Remove duplicate or overly granular metrics that distort alert conditions           |
| You want to maintain consistent performance and cost control                        | Routine observability hygiene | Review recommendations and automate metric optimization on a schedule               |

In the next milestone, you learn how Adaptive Metrics works.