Now GA: New Relic Cardinality Control for complete IT visibility

When monitoring complex, distributed systems, having high-fidelity data is essential for effective and rapid incident resolution. However, the sheer volume of unique metric combinations can quickly escalate into a painful trade-off: either incur an unmanageable cost or lose the granularity needed for actionable insights.

New Relic is changing that equation with the general availability of Cardinality Control—a breakthrough capability that allows users to scale high-fidelity data while easily managing run-away costs that traditional high-cardinality data ingestion and analysis brings. Starting with 15 million cardinality per account, this advancement represents a fundamental shift in how IT operations teams can approach root cause analysis (RCA) and troubleshooting, providing the observability industry’s most cost-effective solution for cardinality.

The value Cardinality Control brings to your operations

High-cardinality data occurs when metrics contain numerous unique combinations of labels or dimensions. Consider network monitoring scenarios where you're tracking metrics across thousands of devices, each with multiple interfaces, protocols, and traffic patterns. Traditional observability platforms often force you to choose between comprehensive data collection and manageable costs.

New Relic's Cardinality Control removes these traditional constraints, enabling IT operations teams to collect, store, and analyze high-cardinality data without sampling or artificial limits. This capability delivers several key operational benefits:

• Control and flexibility- Rather than facing escalating charges based on cardinality volume, Cardinality Control provides a generous baseline of 15 million cardinality per account. IT teams can easily scale their data fidelity through a user-friendly UI to achieve the level of granularity needed while avoiding surprise billing spikes, making it easier to budget for comprehensive observability across a growing ecosystem.
• Complete network visibility- Network monitoring generates some of the highest-cardinality data in IT environments. With Cardinality Control, you can monitor every network device, interface, and flow without compromising data granularity. This means tracking performance metrics across thousands of network endpoints while maintaining the ability to drill down to individual interface-level analytics.

• Enhanced root cause analysis- When issues occur, having access to complete, unsampled data dramatically improves your ability to identify root causes and troubleshoot issues quickly. Instead of extrapolating from sampled data points, your team can analyze the full context of system behavior leading up to and during incidents.
• Eliminating cardinality constraints- Teams can focus on analysis of key historical data to predict and prevent future occurrences rather than complex data preprocessing, multiple monitoring tiers, or custom aggregation logic.

Cardinality Control in action: network monitoring

To illustrate the practical impact of Cardinality Control, consider a typical network monitoring scenario; your organization operates a distributed network infrastructure with hundreds of routers, switches, and firewalls across multiple data centers.

Cardinality Control advantage

By removing constraints around ingesting high-cardinality data and providing an easy to use UI to keep costs predictable and manageable, New Relic's approach enables you to:

• Scale without compromise: Add new network segments, devices, or monitoring dimensions without worrying about hitting cardinality limits or facing cost escalations.
• Ingest complete telemetry: Collect metrics from every network device and interface without sampling or aggregation. This includes SNMP metrics, flow data, and syslog information across your entire infrastructure.
• Maintain granular, predictive analysis: Access interface-level performance data, including bandwidth utilization, packet loss, error rates, and traffic patterns for every monitored endpoint to prevent future issues.

The Network Data Ingest and Cardinality quickstart provides pre-built dashboards specifically designed to help you analyze both overall data ingest and cardinality patterns from your network monitoring deployment. These visualizations give you insights into your telemetry patterns while demonstrating the comprehensive coverage that Cardinality Control enables.

Getting started with Cardinality Control for network monitoring involves leveraging New Relic Translate Network Monitoring agent, which can handle high-cardinality telemetry without the traditional constraints. The included alerting capabilities can notify you of cardinality patterns or potential issues, ensuring you maintain optimal monitoring coverage.

Transforming Your observability strategy

Cardinality Control represents more than just a technical capability—it's an opportunity to fundamentally rethink your observability strategy and keep costs predictable. Instead of designing monitoring around platform limitations, you can focus on comprehensive coverage that truly reflects your system's complexity.

This shift enables IT operations teams to move from reactive monitoring to proactive system optimization. With complete visibility into system behavior, you can identify performance trends, capacity planning opportunities, and optimization targets that might have been invisible with sampled or limited data.

Start leveraging Cardinality Control today

Ready to eliminate cardinality constraints from your observability strategy and fast-track RCA and MTTR? New Relic' Cardinality Control is now generally available and can be implemented immediately for new and existing monitoring deployments.

To get started, sign up for a free New Relic account or log into your existing environment, which includes 15 million cardinality per account. Install the Network Data Ingest to begin exploring the comprehensive visibility that Cardinality Control enables. For IT operations teams ready to achieve complete system visibility without compromise, Cardinality Control provides the foundation for truly comprehensive observability at enterprise scale.

Looking Ahead with New Relic 

The GA of New Relic Cardinality Control is further proof of our commitment to simplifying RCA and troubleshooting for our customers. For additional information:

• Getting Started Doc