Docs » Metrics pipeline management in Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring » Introduction to metrics pipeline management

Introduction to metrics pipeline management 🔗

Available in Enterprise Edition. For more information, see Subscription types, expansions, renewals, and terminations.

Metrics pipeline management (MPM) is an evolution of the Splunk Observability Cloud metrics platform that offers you solutions to centrally manage metric cardinality.

With MPM, you have more control over how you ingest and store your metrics, so you can lower costs and improve monitoring performance without updating the configuration of your instance of the Splunk Distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector. To remove data pre-ingest using the Collector, see Control data to ingest using the Collector.

What is metric cardinality, and how does it impact your observability? 🔗

Metric cardinality is the number of unique metric time series (MTS) produced by a combination of metric name and its associated dimensions. A metric has high cardinality when it has a high number of dimension keys, and a high number of possible unique values for those dimension keys.

For example, say you send in data for the metric http.server.duration. If http.server.duration has only 1 dimension endpoint with 3 unique values: A, B, and C, then http.server.duration generates 3 MTS.

If you add another dimension region with 3 unique values: us-east, us-west, and eu, then http.server.duration generates 9 MTS: 3 endpoints * 3 regions.

Even though http.server.duration only has 2 dimensions, metric cardinality is already 9 since each dimension has multiple possible values.

For more information, see Aggregation rules limitations.

High cardinality in your system 🔗

High-cardinality metrics allow you to perform detailed analysis and troubleshooting, but they can lead to challenges in data management and system performance​​, as well as incur higher storage costs. With MPM, you can manage and reduce your metrics’ data volume and mitigate any issues caused by high cardinality.

Use metric pipeline management to control your data volume 🔗

For each metric you send to Splunk Observability Cloud, MPM can help you configure how to ingest, keep, and manage the metric’s data volume and cardinality.

For example, you can decide to route your low-value metrics to archived metrics, a low-cost data tier, or even entirely drop them. Meanwhile, your high-value metrics continue to be routed to the real-time tier for alerting and monitoring. To learn more, see Use data routing to keep, archive, or discard your metrics.

You can also convert a high-cardinality metric into a low-cardinality metric by aggregating away the dimensions that are not needed. To learn more, see Use routing exception rules to route a specific MTS or restore archived data.

Control data ingestion and storage: Keep, archive or drop your data 🔗

You can control your data ingestion and storage with MPM’s routing capabilities:

  • Ingest and keep metrics in real time. Metrics stored in the real-time tier are available in charts and detectors.

  • Send your data to archived metrics. Archived metrics are not available in charts and detectors. You can change routing to real-time or filter a subset of data to real -time to make those metrics available in charts and detectors again. You can also restore archived data from up to 8 days in case you need it.

  • Drop your metrics. If you select this option, metrics will be dropped and won’t be available for monitoring. You can still keep aggregated MTS derived from those metrics.

To learn more, see Use data routing to keep, archive, or discard your metrics.

Archived metrics 🔗

You can scale your metric data by sending and storing low-value, infrequently accessed metrics in a cheaper archival tier. Metrics stored in archived metrics are kept, but you cannot use them in charts or detectors directly.

Note

Archived Metrics cost one-tenth of real-time metrics.

If you need to use a metric that you’ve sent to archived metrics you can route it back to real-time metrics and access it in charts or detectors. You can also backfill historical data from up to 8 days and restore it to the real-time tier if you need to.

Caution

You can only create aggregation rules using your metrics’ dimensions. Aggregation using custom properties or tags is not supported. For more information on each type of metadata, refer to Metadata: Dimensions, custom properties, tags, and attributes.

When you select specific dimensions, metrics pipeline management generates a new metric. The system creates new MTS based on the dimensions you select and rolls up data points for each MTS. By default, aggregation rules roll up the data points into the new MTS using sum, min, max, count, delta, avg, and latest functions. You can use the new aggregated MTS in the same way as any other MTS in Observability Cloud.

How is this different from post-ingestion aggregation at query time? 🔗

When you configure charts or detectors, you can aggregate your data using analytic functions, such as sum, and then group your data by specific dimensions, such as sum by region. This aggregation occurs after Observability Cloud has stored your raw MTS, so you still pay for storing the data.

With metrics pipeline management, you can aggregate your MTS as you store it and retain only aggregated metrics. Since you’re storing fewer dimensions for each data point, and metrics pipeline management roles up the metric values, you save storage costs.

Example 🔗

You send a metric called http.server.duration for a containerized workload using Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring.

Your workload has 10 endpoints, 20 regions, 5 services, and 10,000 containers. Each of the 5 services has 10,000 containers and 10 endpoints.

Your data is coming in at the container ID level, generating 10 (endpoints) * 5 (services) * 20 (regions) * 10,000 (containers) = 1,000,000 MTS.

You can reduce your metric cardinality by aggregating one or multiple dimensions.

Aggregate using one dimension 🔗

You are only interested in the source region of your data, so you create an aggregation rule that groups your data by the region dimension.

The aggregated metric removes all other dimensions and retains only the region dimension based on your rule. There are only 20 different values for region, so only Observability Cloud only ingests 20 MTS.

Aggregate using multiple dimensions 🔗

You want to continue monitoring endpoints, regions, and services for your data, but don’t need to monitor container IDs. You create an aggregation rule that groups your data by the dimensions you want to keep.

The aggregated metric removes the container_id dimension and retains endpoint, region, and service based on your rule. Your new metric volume is: 10 (endpoints) * 20 (regions) * 5 (services) = 1,000 MTS.

Data dropping rules 🔗

Data dropping rules let you discard any data you don’t want to monitor, so you can reduce metrics volume and save cost. For example, if you create a new aggregated metric, you might no longer need the original unaggregated data.

Note that:

Note

Aggregation and routing exceptions are independent from routing. You can create aggregation rules in any routing scenario: real time, archived, or dropped. However, you can only create routing exception rules when routing is set to Archived Metrics.

Before you drop any data, see Impact and benefits of archiving or dropping data.

Control your data volume: Aggregate your metrics 🔗

The data you send from your services to Splunk Observability Cloud can have high cardinality. Instead of adjusting how you are sending in your data before you send it, aggregation rules allow you to summarize your data based on the dimensions you consider important by rolling up your selected metric data into new metrics that take up less storage and increase computational performance.

With aggregation rules, you can use filters to select a subset of MTS in the metric, then keep or drop dimensions in those MTS with an aggregation rule. MPM keeps selected dimensions for the MTS only in the newly created aggregated metric.

Caution

You can only create aggregation rules using your metrics’ dimensions. Aggregation using custom properties or tags is not supported. For more information on each type of metadata, refer to Metadata: Dimensions, custom properties, tags, and attributes.

By aggregating combinations of dimensions that provide useful insights while dropping a large amount of the unaggregated raw data, you can significantly reduce your organization’s data footprint.

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

Note

Aggregation and routing exceptions are independent from routing. You can create aggregation rules in any routing scenario: real-time, archived, or dropped. However, you can only create routing exception rules when routing is set to archived metrics.

Metrics pipeline management limitations 🔗

MPM is not available for the following types of metrics:

  • Metrics ingested through the https://ingest.signalfx.com/v1/collectd endpoint

  • Splunk Observability Cloud’s org metrics

  • APM’s MetricSets

Aggregation rules limitations 🔗

You can only create aggregation rules using your metrics’ dimensions. Aggregation using custom properties or tags is not supported. For more information on each type of metadata, refer to Metadata: Dimensions, custom properties, tags, and attributes.

Histogram metrics limitations 🔗

You cannot archive or aggregate histogram metrics. By default, they are routed to the real-time tier, and you can drop them with rules as well.

Aggregation rules limitations 🔗

You can only create aggregation rules using your metrics’ dimensions. Aggregation using custom properties or tags is not supported. For more information on each type of metadata, refer to Metadata: Dimensions, custom properties, tags, and attributes.

Learn more 🔗

See the following docs to learn more about MPM:

To learn more about metrics and cardinality, see: