On 11.07.23 15:23, 'Braden Schaeffer' via Prometheus Developers wrote: > They could live for 5s or 1 hour.
The whole idea of a Prometheus counter doesn't really make sense for a job that lives for just 5s, if you are scraping every 15s or every minute or so. And a job that lives for 1 hour should be scraped directly. So in the first case, using a counter doesn't make sense, and in the second case using the Pushgateway doesn't make sense. > Does it really matter what you send to pushgateway? It supports > counters so why not push them? We could be stricter and just reject counters being pushed to the Pushgateway, but that would be a breaking change. Historically, the metric type information in Prometheus was (and to a good part still is) some kind of "weak typing", so no hard restrictions were imposed (you can apply `rate` to a gauge or `delta` to a counter without Prometheus complaining about it). Also, it feels natural to count "records backed up by the daily database back up job" in a counter and push it to the Pushgateway. However, when it arrives on your Prometheus server, it doesn't really behave as a counter. Summing those values up across instances is really painful with PromQL, and the reason for that is that we are essentially handling events here, for which Prometheus as a whole wasn't really designed. If you really have to use Prometheus for that case, the "least bad" solutions I know of is statsd with the statsd-exporter ( https://github.com/prometheus/statsd_exporter ) or the prom-aggregation-gateway ( https://github.com/zapier/prom-aggregation-gateway ). A TTL doesn't really address the fundamental problem. It might enable a very brittle solution that is worse than the solution that are already available. -- Björn Rabenstein [PGP-ID] 0x851C3DA17D748D03 [email] [email protected] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Prometheus Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/prometheus-developers/ZK6SUuQBF4657EAX%40mail.rabenste.in.
