View and understand your metrics usage

Usage analytics provides interactive charts and visual summaries that show how your metrics contribute to your overall usage relative to your subscription plan. You can inspect individual metrics to see which dimensions they include, which tokens they are linked to, and how they are used across dashboards and charts. Usage Analytics provides deeper insights into each metric's context, including its associated dimensions, tokens, and visualizations.

Understand metric usage with the metrics table

The metric usage table displays the following fields:

Show hidden utilization columns

Detectors, active charts, API queries, and inactive charts columns are hidden by default. To show them, follow these steps:

1. Select Settings in the usage analytics table.

   

2. Under Show/Hide Columns, select each utilization column to show in the table.

Filtering metrics by utilization

You can filter metrics in the usage analytics table to focus on specific utilization levels, such as unused metrics, actively referenced metrics, or those tied to detectors and API queries.

To apply a utilization filter:

1. Select the filter box labeled Utilization: Any at the top of the page.

2. From the dropdown menu, select the desired utilization level (e.g., Unused, R3 – Active charts, R4 – Detectors).

3. Select Run search to apply the filter.

The table will update to show only metrics matching the selected criteria. To clear the filter and return to the full view, select Reset.

Metric profile: contents and structure

Usage Analytics includes a detailed profile for each metric, helping you understand how it is structured and used across your environment. To access a metric profile, select any metric directly from the metric usage table.

Within the profile view, you can filter the data by Billing class and Time period to narrow down the scope of analysis.

Each metric profile provides insights into:

• Total number of associated metric time series (MTS)
• Percentage of total MTS the metric represents
• Related tokens and dimensions
• Referencing charts and detectors

This information helps you assess the scope, relevance, and optimization potential of each metric within your system.

Metric profile data is organized into four separate tables, each focusing on a different aspect of metric usage:

Manage and reduce your metrics usage

This section provides practical strategies for identifying metrics that can be aggregated, archived, or dropped to help reduce your overall metric usage.

Archive or drop unused metrics

Using the metrics table, you can find metrics that aren't used. If you have any unused metrics, you can archive them so they take up less of your usage plan.

• Archived metrics are routed to an archival path in Splunk Observability Cloud, where they remain inactive and incur lower billing costs. You can restore them at any time if needed.
• If you don't plan to use certain metrics in the future, consider dropping them entirely to free up usage capacity.

Aggregate metrics with low utility scores

Metrics with low utility scores may be good candidates for aggregation, which helps reduce the total number of metric time series.

To evaluate whether aggregation is appropriate:

1. Select the metric from the metrics table to open its profile.
2. Select the Detectors tab to check if the metric is used in any detectors.
3. If not, check the Charts tab to see which charts use it.
4. Assess whether the metric is essential in those charts. If not, consider aggregating it with other dimensions to reduce usage.

To learn more, see Use aggregation rules to control your data volume.

High-cardinality metrics can significantly increase usage. To manage this:

• Use routing exception rules to reroute specific metric time series (MTS).
• Archive or drop MTS that include dimensions you don't actively use.

To learn more, see Use routing exception rules to route a specific MTS or restore archived data.