Shape your metrics data

When ingesting metrics into Chronosphere Observability Platform, managing the cardinality of persisted data can be challenging. Metric cardinality is the number of unique time series produced by a combination of metric names and their associated labels. Cardinality is the total number of these combinations. The more combinations there are, the greater a metric’s cardinality is, and the more data Observability Platform persists. This can affect your license.

After sending data to Observability Platform, use the Live Telemetry Analyzer to identify opportunities to reduce the overall volume of metrics. If you’re sending Prometheus metrics to Observability Platform, you can also use the Telemetry Usage Analyzer to identify obsolete or unnecessary data, and understand the impact of a proposed shaping rule to users of that data.

Use the Chronosphere Control Plane to reduce the amount of data retained in your system over time. Create shaping rules to drop data before it reaches Observability Platform, aggregate and rewrite data into more manageable and usable statistics, and alias expressions to improve data queries and references.

After creating shaping rules, use the Aggregation Rules UI to understand your existing shaping rules and how they affect your environment. Use the shaping impact preview to preview the impact of a rule on your overall system, which helps prevent breaking changes and ensure the rules you create operate as expected.

After configuring shaping rules, define metrics quotas and pools to assign specific percentages of your total persisted writes limit to pools of metrics.

If you identify data you absolutely don’t need and want to reduce the data you send to Observability Platform, adjust what metric data you send from the client-side by using mechanisms like relabel rules in the Chronosphere Collector.