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Workflow: Schema Exploration & Governance

Auditing label health and eliminating high-cardinality indexing mistakes in Grafana Loki.

Step 1: Global Taxonomy Inspection​

List all indexed label names currently registered across the Loki cluster:

get_cluster_labels()

Confirm that only low-cardinality dimensions (e.g. environment, cluster, namespace, app, container) are indexed.

Step 2: Cardinality & Active Series Audit​

Audit active streams to detect any high-cardinality values mistakenly indexed as stream labels:

get_active_series(match=['{cluster="prod-1"}'])

What the Tool Evaluates:

  • Total Active Stream Count: Checks if stream volume is within healthy operational thresholds.
  • Top Cardinality Labels: Highlights any label with high unique value counts (such as user_id, trace_id, or client_ip incorrectly passed as Promtail labels).
  • Remediation Recommendation: Advises moving dynamic attributes into structured metadata (structured_metadata in Loki 3.0+) or log line bodies extracted via | json at query time.