Hey, I'm the person who wrote the blog. I was slightly interested in the pattern too but didn't take the time to look into it. I assumed it was either something to do with a service sending us traffic in that pattern or maybe just something to do with Grafana. It could also be some unexplained behaviour in our system, maybe something to do with how we are pulling items off the queue. If I find some time next week I might take a proper look though!
If you’re using Prometheus and restarting servers regularly (a default behaviour for gunicorn for example) then you’ll lose a little data, up to your Prometheus scrape period, ever restart.
My team found this pretty annoying for monitoring a Django site so we’ve ended up moving to a statsd push-based metrics approach and are finding numbers generally easier to trust and reason about.