diff --git a/charts/datafold/charts/worker-temporal/templates/deployment.yaml b/charts/datafold/charts/worker-temporal/templates/deployment.yaml
index bd86e88..667577e 100644
--- a/charts/datafold/charts/worker-temporal/templates/deployment.yaml
+++ b/charts/datafold/charts/worker-temporal/templates/deployment.yaml
@@ -22,6 +22,13 @@ spec:
         {{- include "worker-temporal.datafold.annotations" . | nindent 8 }}
         {{- include "worker-temporal.datadog.annotations" . | nindent 8 }}
         {{- if .Values.metrics.enabled }}
+        # Drop Temporal sticky task-queue samples at scrape time. Every workflow
+        # worker creates a per-pod sticky queue (task_queue="sticky.<pod>-worker-pod"),
+        # which explodes the cardinality of the task_queue tag. exclude_metrics_by_labels
+        # regex-matches the scraped label VALUE and drops the whole sample, keeping the
+        # real queues (io, highmem, storage, storagehigh, monitors, ...) queryable.
+        # NOTE: ignore_tags does NOT work here — it only filters Autodiscovery/Tagger
+        # tags and the `tags` option, never labels scraped from the /metrics endpoint.
         ad.datadoghq.com/{{ .Chart.Name }}.checks: |
           {
             "openmetrics": {
@@ -37,9 +44,9 @@ spec:
                 },
                 "collect_histogram_buckets": true,
                 "histogram_buckets_as_distributions": true,
-                "ignore_tags": [
-                  "task_queue:sticky\\..*"
-                ]
+                "exclude_metrics_by_labels": {
+                  "task_queue": ["^sticky\\."]
+                }
               }]
             }
           }