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Metrics & Cardinality explorer

ollyScale provides a powerful interface for analyzing OpenTelemetry metrics, with specific tools designed to help you understand the shape and cardinality of your telemetry data.

Metrics Table

The metrics table offers a dense, high-information view of all ingested metrics.

Metrics Table

Click the Chart button to visualize metric data over time:

Metrics Chart

Key Columns

  • Name: The full OTel metric name (e.g., http.server.response.size).
  • Unit: The unit of measurement (e.g., By, ms).
  • Type: The metric type (Histogram, Sum, Gauge, etc.).
  • Resources: Click to view the unique resource combinations associated with this metric.
  • Cardinality: Shows the number of label dimensions vs the total number of unique time series (e.g., 8 labels / 185 series).

Cardinality Explorer

Clicking on the blue Cardinality link for any metric opens the Cardinality Explorer. This tool is essential for understanding "high cardinality" issues and exploring your data's dimensions.

1. Header Stats

  • Total Series (Historic): The total number of unique time series seen for this metric since startup (persisted in Redis).
  • Active Series (1h): The count of series seen in the last hour.
  • Label Dimensions: The number of unique label keys (e.g., http.method, http.status_code).

2. Label Analysis Table

This table helps you identify which labels are contributing most to your cardinality.

  • Label Name: The key of the label.
  • Cardinality: The number of unique values for this label.
  • Values (Top 5): A preview of the most common values.
  • If there are more than 5 values, a clickable ... link expands the list to show all values inline.

3. Raw Active Series

A scrollable view of all active series in a PromQL-like syntax:

{container.id="...", http.method="GET", http.route="/api/traces", http.status_code="200", service.name="ollyscale-ui"}
{container.id="...", http.method="GET", http.route="/health", http.status_code="200", service.name="ollyscale-ui"}

Export Actions

Use the buttons in the "Raw Active Series" section to export data for offline analysis:

  • Copy PromQL: Copies the visible series list to your clipboard.
  • Download JSON: Downloads the full series object as a JSON file.

Cardinality Protection

ollyScale includes built-in protection against cardinality explosions to prevent memory exhaustion during local development.

  • Hard Limit: 1000 unique metric names (configurable).
  • Visual Warnings:
  • ⚠️ Yellow: > 70% capacity
  • 🔴 Red: > 90% capacity
  • Behavior: Metrics exceeding the limit are dropped, and a system alert is triggered.

See Cardinality Protection for more details.