Design Prometheus metrics that don't explode cardinality

domain: prometheus · 4 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗

Steps

  1. Label values must be LOW cardinality (status, method, route-template) — never user ids, emails, full URLs
  2. Use histogram buckets tuned to your SLO range; prefer native/exponential histograms where supported
  3. Expose /metrics; scrape-side relabeling drops noisy labels
  4. Record rules for expensive dashboard queries

Known gotchas

Related routes

Use promtool tsdb analyze and the Prometheus TSDB API to identify and remediate high-cardinality metric labels
prometheus.io · 6 steps · unrated
Control metric cardinality by applying metric_relabel_configs to drop or aggregate high-cardinality labels
prometheus.io · 6 steps · unrated
Write PromQL recording rules to pre-aggregate high-cardinality metrics and speed up dashboard queries
prometheus.io · 5 steps · unrated

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