Skip to main content
Card class: Non-HeroCategory: Cache

At a glance

Expired Keys / minute is the rate at which Redis removes keys that have reached their TTL, derived from the expired_keys counter in INFO stats. Unlike eviction, expiry is intentional and healthy: it is the cache doing exactly what it was told to do. The line is most useful as a baseline; a sudden change in the expiry rate usually means a change in how the application is setting TTLs, not a problem with Redis itself.

What it tracks

The card plots Expired Keys / minute over time, computed as the per-minute delta of the cumulative expired_keys counter from INFO stats. A key is counted here when it reaches its TTL and is removed, either lazily (touched after expiry) or by the active expiry cycle Redis runs in the background. This is distinct from Evicted Keys / minute: expired keys were always meant to die at their TTL, whereas evicted keys were still wanted and were dropped under memory pressure. A steady expiry rate that tracks your write volume is normal. A sudden jump can mean a batch of short-TTL keys was just written (for example a flush-and-reload of a session or rate-limit set); a drop to near zero can mean TTLs were accidentally removed or lengthened in a recent deploy, which will quietly grow memory use over time. The window is 1h (a rolling per-minute rate) and there is no alert threshold on this card (alert: -); it is a context and baseline metric rather than a pager. Read it next to memory and eviction to tell healthy TTL churn apart from memory pressure.

Reconciling against the source

Confirm against Redis directly with redis-cli INFO stats | grep -E 'expired_keys|evicted_keys', differencing two readings 60 seconds apart for the per-minute rate; for ElastiCache or MemoryDB the CloudWatch Reclaimed metric is the managed-service equivalent.

Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Expired Keys / minute is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Redis and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.