What is High Cardinality Data?
While reading a GitHub issue on the OpenTelemetry Collector about trying to send two versions of a metric, one with higher and one with lower cardinality, it occurred to me that we’ve never written on this blog about what is high-cardinality data exactly and how it matters to your OpenTelemetry observability. High-cardinality data refers to a dataset or data attribute that contains a large number of distinct values relative to the total number of data points.