Grafana Cloud Adaptive Metrics

Docs: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/cost-management-and-billing/reduce-costs/metrics-costs/adaptive-metrics.md

Aggregation rules that pre-shrink high-cardinality metrics before storage — directly reduces active-series billing.

Prerequisites

• Grafana Cloud Metrics plan (any paid tier)
• API key with metrics:write (for the Adaptive Metrics API — adaptive-metrics.grafana.net, Bearer auth)
• For the verification queries: the metrics query endpoint (prometheus-prod-XX.grafana.net) uses HTTP basic auth — <metrics_user> (numeric stack/instance ID) plus a token with metrics:read — not the Bearer key
• Access to Home → Adaptive Metrics in the Cloud portal

Common Workflows

1. Review + apply auto-recommendations

# 1. Pull the recommendation list (sorted by series-reduction impact)
curl -s -H "Authorization: Bearer <KEY>" \
  "https://adaptive-metrics.grafana.net/api/v1/recommendations" \
  | jq '.recommendations[] | {metric_name, current_series, projected_series, estimated_reduction_percent}'

# 2. Capture the baseline series count for the target metric
#    (metrics query endpoint = basic auth, not the Bearer key)
curl -s -u "<metrics_user>:<metrics_token>" \
  "https://prometheus-prod-XX.grafana.net/api/prom/api/v1/query?query=count({__name__=\"process_cpu_seconds_total\"})" \
  | jq '.data.result[0].value[1]'   # → e.g. "12480"

# 3. Apply the recommendation (or click Apply in the UI)
curl -s -X POST -H "Authorization: Bearer <KEY>" \
  "https://adaptive-metrics.grafana.net/api/v1/recommendations/<ID>/apply"

# 4. Wait ~5 min. Verify — re-run the count query; expect a large drop.
#    Also check the saving metric:
#      grafanacloud_instance_active_series_dropped_by_aggregation_rules

Rollback — delete the rule:

curl -s -H "Authorization: Bearer <KEY>" \
  "https://adaptive-metrics.grafana.net/api/v1/rules" | jq '.rules[] | {id, metric_name}'
curl -s -X DELETE -H "Authorization: Bearer <KEY>" \
  "https://adaptive-metrics.grafana.net/api/v1/rules/<RULE_ID>"
# Or in the UI: Rules → row → Disable

2. Hand-write a custom rule

# 1. Sanity-check the metric is not used WITH that label in dashboards/alerts
grep -r 'process_cpu_seconds_total' dashboards/ alerts/ | grep -E 'version|go_version'
# Expect no hits → safe to drop.

# 2. Create the rule
curl -s -X POST -H "Authorization: Bearer <KEY>" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  "https://adaptive-metrics.grafana.net/api/v1/rules" \
  -d '{"rules":[{"metric_name":"process_cpu_seconds_total","match_type":"MATCH_TYPE_EXACT",
                 "drop_labels":["version","go_version"],
                 "aggregations":[{"type":"AGGREGATION_TYPE_SUM"}]}]}'

# 3. Verify — same count() query as above; series count should drop within 5 min.

Full payloads (regex match, aggregation types, all caveats): references/api.md.

3. Drop unused metrics entirely

# 1. List unused metrics
curl -s -H "Authorization: Bearer <KEY>" \
  "https://adaptive-metrics.grafana.net/api/v1/usage-analysis?filter=unused" | \
  jq '.metrics[] | {metric_name, series_count, last_queried}'

# 2. Confirm not referenced in dashboards / alerts / recording rules
grep -r '<METRIC_NAME>' dashboards/ alerts/ recording-rules/

# 3. Add a write_relabel_config drop in Alloy (full block in references/api.md)
#    Reload Alloy: curl -X POST http://localhost:12345/-/reload

# 4. Verify — the metric should no longer appear in series counts after ~10 min
curl -s -u "<metrics_user>:<metrics_token>" \
  'https://prometheus-prod-XX.grafana.net/api/prom/api/v1/label/__name__/values' | jq '.data | index("<METRIC_NAME>")'  # → null

Measure the impact

# Total active series (billed unit)
grafanacloud_instance_active_series

# Series specifically dropped by Adaptive Metrics rules
grafanacloud_instance_active_series_dropped_by_aggregation_rules

Rules take effect within ~5 minutes; full billing impact appears within an hour. The original high-cardinality samples keep flowing but the dropped labels no longer count toward billing.

Resources

• Adaptive Metrics docs
• Adaptive Logs docs
• Cardinality in Prometheus