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] bjo...@rabenste.in -- 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 prometheus-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/prometheus-developers/ZK6SUuQBF4657EAX%40mail.rabenste.in.
