Dashboard Performance Issues When Using High-Cardinality Dynamic Variables

Products

• DX OpenExplore

Issue/Introduction

Dashboards may become slow, unresponsive, or fail to load when a dynamic dashboard variable attempts to enumerate a very large number of point tag values (for example, Asset IDs).

Symptoms

• Dashboard takes a long time to load.
• Browser becomes unresponsive when opening the dashboard.
• Queries only load when a specific filter is manually applied.

Environment

DX OPENEXPLORE

Cause

The dashboard variable is attempting to populate all available values for a high-cardinality tag (such as asset_id).

In large environments, there may be tens of thousands of unique tag values. Rendering and maintaining such a large dropdown creates significant overhead for the dashboard and can negatively impact performance.

Resolution

Instead of using a dynamic dropdown variable for high-cardinality tags:

1. Remove the dynamic variable from the dashboard.
2. Use topk() queries to display the highest-ingesting Asset IDs.
3. Create charts that show:
   • Top Asset IDs by PPS
   • Asset ID ingestion trends
   • Policy-level ingestion summaries

Best Practices

• Avoid dashboard variables on tags with thousands of unique values.
• Use topk(), aggregation, and trend charts to identify the most significant contributors.
• Consider aggregating by higher-level dimensions (for example, environment or account) when an overall view is sufficient.
• Reserve dynamic variables for dimensions with relatively low cardinality.