Grafana Labs has announced updates to its fully managed Grafana Cloud observability platform. The new Adaptive Metrics feature, which enables teams to aggregate unused and partially used time series data to lower costs, is now available for broader public access.

According to the company, this feature leverages enhanced insights into metrics usage recently added to Grafana Cloud’s Cardinality Management dashboards, which are now available in all Grafana Cloud tiers, both free and paid. Together these advancements, powered by the open source project Grafana Mimir, help organizations rapidly scale at cloud native pace while optimizing metric cardinality and controlling costs.

Grafana Cloud’s Cardinality Management dashboards now include insights into the usage of high cardinality metrics, to help distinguish between metrics that are being used and metrics that are unused. The ability to identify high cardinality metrics that are unused in dashboards, queries, recording rules, and alerting rules results in actionable outcomes for SRE or centralized observability teams looking to confidently make data-driven decisions to reduce metrics spend without impacting observability.

The Cardinality Management dashboards were first introduced late last year to Grafana Cloud Pro and Advanced customers, but now are generally available to all Grafana Cloud users, including those on the Grafana Cloud Free tier.

Grafana Cloud’s Adaptive Metrics feature takes insights about usage from the Cardinality Management dashboards one step further: It gives users better control of spend on observability metrics by enabling aggregation of unused or partially used metrics. (With partially used metrics, only a subset of the metric’s labels are used.)

The Adaptive Metrics aggregation engine transforms these metrics into lower cardinality versions of themselves at ingestion. Unused or partially used labels are stripped from incoming metrics, reducing the total count of time series persisted – and thus the user’s monthly bill.

Grafana Cloud Adaptive Metrics is now available in a public access program for all Grafana Cloud tiers.