Analyze your metric usage in Splunk Observability Cloud

Analyze metric time series and dimensional distributions to optimize usage and reduce overhead.

Usage Analytics is a powerful tool in Splunk Observability Cloud that helps you monitor, analyze, and optimize your metric usage. It provides detailed insights into how metrics and dimensions are collected, categorized, and consumed across your infrastructure.

Note: Please be aware that Usage Analytics currently does not reflect the full set of metrics — including aggregated metrics. For this reason, it should be considered a supporting source only when assessing proximity to your license limits. For the most accurate view of your subscription usage, refer to the Subscription Overview.

Access usage analytics

To open Usage Analytics in Splunk Observability Cloud, select Metrics in the left-hand navigation menu, then select Usage analytics from the panel.

Note:
  • If you send too many queries in a short period of time, a rate limiting message may appear. If this happens, wait two minutes and refresh the page.
  • Data on the Usage Analytics pages is refreshed every hour.
  • Usage Analytics does not include APM Monitoring MetricSets, RUM Monitoring MetricSets, or tracing metrics.

Benefits of usage analytics

Gained insights support better decisions about managing telemetry data to reduce volume and improve system efficiency, including possible cost optimisation actions within linked Metrics Pipeline Management and/or Metrics Pipeline Automation.

To help you optimize usage, Usage Analytics offers two complementary analytical views:

Metrics view

Focuses on individual metrics, their utilization levels, associated detectors, charts, and API queries. Includes access to detailed metric profiles.

You can use this view to:

  • Review custom metrics with high cardinality that may significantly impact your usage limits.
  • Trace the origin and ownership of specific metrics to determine whether they should be modified or deprecated.

Read the full guide: Analyze your metrics with Usage Analytics

Dimensions view

Analyze individual dimensions and their usage in the context of metrics. This view provides cardinality insights, usage percentages, and trend analysis to help you understand how dimensions contribute to overall MTS distribution and telemetry volume.

You can use this view to:

  • Identify dimensions with high cardinality that may increase ingestion volume and affect performance.
  • Analyze how specific dimensions are used across metrics to detect redundancy or inefficiencies.
  • Understand which dimensions contribute most to metric fan-out and consider consolidation or filtering strategies.
  • Detect unused or low-value dimensions that could be deprecated to reduce data volume

Read the full guide: Analyze your dimensions with Usage Analytics