Prometheus Counter Behavior After Machine Restart

[faizhalde]

I've been working with Prometheus to monitor counters in my application. Prometheus handles counter resets gracefully, but I encountered a scenario that I have no idea how it gets handled

Suppose I have a counter at value X, then the machine hosting the application goes down. By the time Prometheus scrapes again after the machine restarts, the counter had a spike and has incremented further and is now at value Y, where Y > X. Technically, the counter has grown by (Y + X), can prometheus catch this? Or does it calculate the growth as just (Y - X)?

This could lead to underreporting of the actual increment, correct?