Kubernetes metrics cardinality drives your storage bill long before application traffic does. Every unique combination of labels creates a distinct time series, and many of those series are never displayed in a dashboard or used in an alert rule. They are still collected, stored and sized for like all the others.

This guide proposes four steps: measure, find the metrics nobody reads, cut at the source, then add guardrails. The examples use Prometheus and kube-state-metrics, the most common setup. The approach also applies to an OpenTelemetry Collector sending data to Dynatrace SaaS or Managed. It complements the module on Kubernetes metrics in Grail .

In short

A series is a metric name plus a set of labels.…