---
title: "The value of Adaptive Metrics | Grafana Labs"
description: "Understand how Adaptive Metrics helps you control costs, improve performance, and maintain observability quality as your environment grows."
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

# The value of Adaptive Metrics

As your observability footprint grows, metric data can multiply fast — often faster than you need it to.

Adaptive Metrics is enabled by default, continuously analyzing your metric usage in the background to find optimization opportunities.

This helps you:

- Lower ingestion and storage costs
- Speed up dashboards and queries
- Maintain observability quality as your environment grows
- Automate ongoing optimization to prevent metric sprawl

## Common entry points

You can arrive at Adaptive Metrics from different Grafana workflows depending on the problem you’re trying to solve.

Expand table

| Problem                                                                             | Entry Point                   | Why Use Adaptive Metrics                                                            |
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|-------------------------------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| You see a spike in metric ingestion or cost, or receive a Billing & Usage alert | Cost Management & Billing | Identify which metrics drive the increase and reduce redundant series to lower cost |
| Dashboards take too long to load, or Explore queries time out                       | Dashboards or Explore         | Find and optimize high-cardinality metrics causing performance issues               |
| Alerts or SLO tracking seem noisy or unstable                                       | Alerting or SLOs              | Remove duplicate or overly granular metrics that distort alert conditions           |
| You want to maintain consistent performance and cost control                        | Routine observability hygiene | Review recommendations and automate metric optimization on a schedule               |

In the next milestone, you learn how Adaptive Metrics works.