Taming Metric Cardinality - Practical Cost Reduction With the OpenTelemetry Collector

Discover practical strategies for managing metric cardinality in OpenTelemetry deployments through this 13-minute lightning talk from CNCF. Learn to identify and address high-cardinality metrics that can overwhelm backends with excessive unique time series, leading to increased costs and degraded signal quality. Explore how to leverage the OpenTelemetry Collector and OTTL (OpenTelemetry Transformation Language) to proactively reduce metric cardinality by spotting costly metrics, reshaping or dropping problematic data using the filter processor, testing modifications with the OTTL Playground, and implementing control planes for safe evolution of filtering rules. Gain actionable insights for maintaining sustainable observability costs while improving signal quality, applicable whether using Prometheus, commercial vendors, or OpenTelemetry-native pipelines.