Grafana Cloud Adaptive Metrics

Adaptive Metrics analyses your Prometheus metrics usage and suggests aggregation rules that reduce series count without breaking any queries. Rules pre-aggregate high-cardinality metrics into lower-cardinality forms before storage.

How it works:

1. Adaptive Metrics scans your metric usage (dashboards, alerts, recording rules) over a lookback window
2. It identifies labels that are never queried for a given metric
3. It generates aggregation rules that drop those labels, reducing series count
4. The original high-cardinality metric is still ingested but the aggregated form is what gets stored long-term

Billing: Grafana Cloud charges per Active Series (series that received a sample in the last hour). Adaptive Metrics reduces your Active Series count, directly reducing your bill.

Step 1: Access Adaptive Metrics