[blueybingo]

the zero injection fix for sparse counters is the most underrated part of this writeup -- injecting a synthetic zero on first flush to anchor the cumulative baseline is actaully a pretty elegant solution to a problem that bites almost every team migrating from delta-based systems to prometheus, and the fact that they centralized it in the aggregation tier rather than pushing the fix to every instrumentation callsite is exactly the right call.

[valyala]

There is another approach for solving this issue - to use increase_pure() function from MetricsQL - https://docs.victoriametrics.com/metricsql/#increase_pure . Of course, you need to switch to VictoriaMetrics, since Mimir doesn't support this function.

[hagen1778]

I was under impression that problem of zero injection was solved with Start Timestamp from OpenMetrics 2.0 spec - see https://prometheus.io/docs/specs/om/open_metrics_spec_2_0/#s...