As organizations increasingly adopt cloud-native architectures and tools like Prometheus and Kubernetes, they face challenges in managing the surge of observability metric data, which can lead to increased costs. Grafana Cloud addresses this issue with its new Adaptive Metrics feature, which aggregates unused and partially used metrics into lower cardinality versions to reduce expenses. The upgraded Cardinality Management dashboards further aid cost management by providing insights into high cardinality metrics and indicating their usage status, making informed decisions about metric retention more accessible. While Mimirtool offers similar capabilities, the new dashboards automatically refresh usage indicators every 24 hours and include ad-hoc query logs in their analyses. By pairing these dashboards with Adaptive Metrics, teams can efficiently reduce metric cardinality without disrupting existing systems, as Adaptive Metrics also identifies partially used metrics and optimizes them through an aggregation engine configurable via API or CLI. This feature, now available to all Grafana Cloud users, can eliminate up to 50% of an organization’s time series without compromising observability, offering a scalable and cost-effective solution for managing metric data.