Most recent value or last seen value

Question

Prometheus is built around returning a time series representation of metrics. In many cases, however, I only care about what the state of a metric is right now<

Answer 1

To get the most recent value of my_metric older than 5m without resorting to hacky PromQL queries, you can modify the query.lookback-delta Prometheus option which is where this default 5m value is defined.

For example, specifying --query.lookback-delta=1d in your Prometheus launch options and restarting the service will cause the PromQL query my_metric to return the most recent value of my_metric looking back 24 hours.

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Metrics outside this "look-back time window" are called stale.