Tools / Datadog Interview questions
Why is Metrics without Limits useful for cost control?
By default, every tag combination submitted on a custom metric becomes a separate, billed timeseries - so a high-cardinality tag can inflate cost dramatically even if nobody ever actually queries by that tag.
Metrics without Limits decouples ingestion from indexing: all the data you send continues to be ingested and available in aggregate, but you choose which specific tags stay indexed (queryable), and billing for that metric is based on the indexed volume, not the full ingested volume.
This lets teams keep submitting rich, high-cardinality data from their application code without changing it, while controlling cost purely through tag configuration on the Datadog side - useful when the application team and the person optimizing cost aren't the same people, and re-instrumenting code isn't practical.
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