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Your Metrics Are Lying After They Hit the Cardinality Limit

Cardinality limits can cause metric distortion, impacting monitoring accuracy.

Steady
Signal score
18
Trajectory
↑ Accelerating
7-day est. ~33

Why this scored 18

every term, weighted
Velocity+0.0 / 40

Engagement gained per hour since the last capture, against the fastest item on its own source

Acceleration+10.9 / 25

Whether that velocity is itself speeding up, as a per-hour rate

Cross-source spread+0.0 / 25

How many independent communities are talking about the same entity

Recency+8.5 / 10

Decays to zero over 14 days

Saturation penalty−1.1 / 30

Subtracted once something is big and old — we rank what's next, not what's peaked

Composite18.3

Weights are hand-tuned, not learned — we're calibrating them against realized trends as history accumulates. On a topic's first sighting there's no previous reading to compare against, so acceleration starts from a neutral prior rather than a measurement, and velocity falls back to engagement over its whole lifetime until a second reading exists. Full methodology

Outlook

low confidence · estimate, not a guarantee

7-day

~33

range 0–45

14-day

~37

range 0–51

30-day

~39

range 0–58

Signal history

7-day window (free)
1074

projected trajectory (estimate, not a guarantee)

Entities

opentelemetry
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Drop this in a README or blog post — it updates automatically as the score moves.