Prometheus shows a service's memory metric climbing steadily for days before it gets OOM-killed

Grafana dashboards show a clear upward memory trend with no plateau, ending in a container restart. What does this suggest, and how would you confirm it? Expected reasoning: this pattern is classic for a memory leak (unbounded cache growth, unclosed resources, accumulating objects) rather than a sudden traffic spike, which would show a sharper, traffic-correlated rise. Confirm by correlating the memory metric against request volume (flat/uncorrelated rise points to a leak, not load) and by taking heap dumps or profiling the JVM at different points in the climb to identify what's actually accum