Predicting the future is hard, especially with metrics-based monitoring systems, because metrics cardinality can snowball. This is important because it affects query performance adversely. Having visibility into what’s happening now and workflows to manage cardinality is crucial. Because the answers depend on the quality of questions, a system allows you to ask.

The questions one may have is —

• Which metrics have high cardinality? Is it all metrics or only a few?
• Is it happening suddenly, or has it been happening for a while?
• Can I see the individual metric’s cardinality?
• What percentage of this metric contributes to the overall cardinality of a cluster?
• Can I see the top labels that are the culprits?
• Can I see the trend of cardinality over a week or two?

Introducing Cardinality Explorer to answer this and many more questions so you can get complete visibility into what’s happening with your metrics and make informed decisions instead of just dropping labels randomly or shutting off the instrumentation.

Read more about it here - https://last9.io/changelog/understanding-high-cardinality-metrics-with-levitate/