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Grafana Labs Adds Metrics Cost Management to Grafana Cloud

Grafana Labs 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.

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 now offers:

- 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. Adaptive Metrics recommends aggregations based on an organization's historic usage patterns, and users can choose which aggregation rules to apply. Dashboards, alerts, and historic queries are guaranteed to continue to work as they did before aggregation, with no rewrites needed. If usage needs change, users can immediately revert back to the unaggregated version of a metric and get the extra detail they need going forward.

Based on results reported by early users, Grafana Cloud Adaptive Metrics can eliminate an estimated 20-50% of an organization’s time series with no perceived impact on their ability to observe their systems.

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

"While we've seen the value that Prometheus brings to organizations, we've also seen its popularity lead to rapid adoption and uncontrolled costs," said Tom Wilkie, CTO at Grafana Labs. "In fact, we even had this problem at Grafana Labs, running our own Prometheus monitoring for Grafana Cloud. One of our clusters had grown to over 100 million active series, and 50% of them were unused. We started thinking about how we could solve this problem, and Adaptive Metrics was the answer. We've reduced that cluster by 40%, and we're excited to share this powerful capability with our Grafana Cloud users.”

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Grafana Labs Adds Metrics Cost Management to Grafana Cloud

Grafana Labs 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.

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 now offers:

- 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. Adaptive Metrics recommends aggregations based on an organization's historic usage patterns, and users can choose which aggregation rules to apply. Dashboards, alerts, and historic queries are guaranteed to continue to work as they did before aggregation, with no rewrites needed. If usage needs change, users can immediately revert back to the unaggregated version of a metric and get the extra detail they need going forward.

Based on results reported by early users, Grafana Cloud Adaptive Metrics can eliminate an estimated 20-50% of an organization’s time series with no perceived impact on their ability to observe their systems.

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

"While we've seen the value that Prometheus brings to organizations, we've also seen its popularity lead to rapid adoption and uncontrolled costs," said Tom Wilkie, CTO at Grafana Labs. "In fact, we even had this problem at Grafana Labs, running our own Prometheus monitoring for Grafana Cloud. One of our clusters had grown to over 100 million active series, and 50% of them were unused. We started thinking about how we could solve this problem, and Adaptive Metrics was the answer. We've reduced that cluster by 40%, and we're excited to share this powerful capability with our Grafana Cloud users.”

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According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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