Observability with Prometheus and Grafana

Rate vs. Instant Rate

Both rate and irate compute the per-second rate of change for counter metrics, but they differ in how much history they consider and what kind of insight they provide.

Let's say we have the following data points where t represents time and v represents the value of the metric at that time:

DP0 (t0, v0)
DP1 (t1, v1)
DP2 (t2, v2)
DP3 (t3, v3)
DP4 (t4, v4)
DP5 (t5, v5)
DP6 (t6, v6)
DP7 (t7, v7)

The rate of increase of the metric over the time range from t0 to t7 is calculated as follows:

rate = (v7 - v0)