Expose multiple metrics to Prometheus

Question

[Prometheus] Hello!

I want to expose multiple metrics with the respective timestamps for Prometheus, for example:

test5{job_name="test05"} 15 1512982800000 test5{job_name="test05"} 10 1512986400000 test5{job_name="test05"} 6 1512990000000 test5{job_name="test05"} 20 1512990840000 test5{job_name="test05"} 25 1512993000000

test6{job_name="test06"} 2 1512987840000 test6{job_name="test06"} 3 1512991500000 test6{job_name="test06"} 4 1512991800000 test6{job_name="test06"} 5 1512991920000 test6{job_name="test06"} 6 1512992220000 test6{job_name="test06"} 6 1512996000000 test6{job_name="test06"} 7 1512996240000

test7{job_name="test07"} 1 1512909840000

test8{job_name="test08"} 2 1510317840000

However the Prometheus only scrapes the metrics that have timestamps less than an hour than the current time. Why?

Thanks!

Answer 1

While the metrics format suggests timestamps may be included in metrics endpoints, it seems that Prometheus's official position is that such a feature is unsupported / discouraged (Refs 1-4).

While I can't find evidence to back it up, I would speculate that Prometheus takes only the most recent metric for a given key[label] set. This could be validated by testing with different job_name label values to observe if values are stored when being treated as unique metric values.

This may be a requirement that cannot be met by Prometheus in its current form, and the additional of a bulk api remains to be implemented after nearly 3 years.

• Ref 1
• Ref 2
• Ref 3
• Ref 4