Keep Your Data Volume in Check With Metrics Usage Analytics

Ah, metrics. They're like your diet: you think you're doing fine until you step on the scale (or, in this case, get the bill). You're collecting everything, just in case, but now your storage costs are growing faster than your coffee addiction. But hey, we're here to help you trim that data volume and keep those costs in check with Metrics Usage Analytics.

Available in Splunk's Metrics Pipeline Management, Metrics Usage Analytics offers platform engineers a powerful tool to assess their organization's metric usage, with insights designed to reduce the impact of data cardinality on your bottom line.

With this new capability, engineers gain complete visibility into your metric time series (MTS) usage, so they can make informed decisions about what data is necessary and what can be archived or dropped. Here's how it works:

1. Understand Your Metrics at a Glance

When you first open Metrics Usage Analytics, you're presented with a comprehensive overview of your system's Metric Time Series (MTS) count, trend data, and utilization across different billing classes. The interface makes it easy to assess your metrics over the last 24 hours, or any custom period, giving you a complete and accurate view of the current state of your data usage.

 

This bird's eye view helps you quickly spot spikes or dips in MTS volume, understand the source of these fluctuations, and compare usage against the previous billing cycle. Whether your costs are rising due to increased traffic or unnecessary data collection, Metrics Usage Analytics helps you pinpoint the issue before it spirals out of control.

2. Find and Manage Unused Metrics

Not all data holds equal value for your business. While some metrics are critical for monitoring and troubleshooting, others might be taking up valuable storage space without providing any real benefits. Metrics Usage Analytics allows you to identify and filter unused metrics - those that are still being collected but aren't adding value to your insights.

Once identified, you can easily drop or archive these metrics using an intuitive interface, freeing up space and reducing costs without losing key performance indicators. The ability to differentiate between high- and low-value metrics is a critical step in optimizing your data storage and keeping expenses in line with your business growth.

3. Slice and Dice Your Data by Utilization and Tokens

Metrics Usage Analytics makes diving deeper into your metrics simple by allowing you to slice data across multiple dimensions, including tokens (teams, apps, or services sending data) and utilization (whether the metric is being used or not). This provides a granular view into who's sending the most data, what they're sending, and how much of it is useful.

For example, you can filter to see which team's metrics are responsible for the highest data volumes or which services are contributing to a sudden spike in your MTS count. This visibility helps you make informed decisions about where to optimize and reduce unnecessary data collection.

4. Monitor Key Metrics with the Utility Score

The Utility Score is a powerful feature within Metrics Usage Analytics that provides a quick assessment of how much value each metric brings to your monitoring strategy. Metrics with higher utility scores are actively being used in charts, detectors, or queries, while those with lower scores might be taking up space unnecessarily.

This score gives you a concise and powerful summary of the value of the underlying metric, helping you quickly determine which metrics should be prioritized for storage and which ones you can safely archive. It's a simple way to ensure your data collection aligns with your business needs and avoids bloating your storage costs.

 

5. Archive Metrics for Long-Term Storage

Sometimes, you don't need to delete data - you just need to put it aside for long-term storage. Splunk Observability's archive functionality allows you to safely store less critical metrics for future use without keeping them active in your primary monitoring setup. This helps reduce the cardinality and cost associated with your active metrics while preserving valuable historical data for auditing or retrospective analysis.

Archiving unused or low-utility metrics using Splunk's Archived Metrics is a smart way to manage your data more efficiently, ensuring you only pay for the metrics you need in real time. One of our latest updates of that functionality also notifies you whether data isn't showing up in your charts or detectors because it has been archived, allowing you to know what happened to that metric and when to create exception rules.

 

Optimize Your Data and Keep Your Costs Under Control

With Metrics Usage Analytics, you have the insights to deeply understand the real value of your metric usage. By identifying and archiving unused or low-value metrics, slicing data by utilization and tokens, and leveraging the Utility Score, you can significantly reduce your storage costs and streamline your data collection strategy.

It's time to stop guessing and start making data-driven decisions that keep your telemetry bill in check without sacrificing the metrics that matter most to your business.

Ready to optimize your metrics and reduce your costs? Start using it today and see the difference it makes to your storage and monitoring expenses.

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