What Grafana version and what operating system are you using? Grafana 12.0.0 (OSS, self-hosted) Prometheus 3.3.1 Debian 11.11 What are you trying to achieve? The end result I want is a heatmap: time on the x-axis, buckets on the y-axis, and cell shading by the histogram count of that bucket…

For completeness, my solution was to use TraceQL, which I still think is a bit dumb since Tempo is already calculating and feeding metrics into Prometheus once, and our app instrumentation is sending those same OpenTelemetry metrics directly to Prometheus as well, but this accomplishes what I want, …

Maybe How to visualize Prometheus histograms in Grafana | Grafana Labs will help. Generally, Prometheus is not a good storage for sparse data, so that can be also a problem.

I’m re-reading that blog post now, but the increase function it mentions mangles the data further. I don’t understand your comment about sparse data. We use Prometheus because it’s a time-series database, and have not encountered issues drilling down to specific measurements in Grafana, but we are …

[image] smaddock: I don’t understand your comment about sparse data. You will stop sending metric (e.g. counter) to Prometheus, but range query will be returning still the latest value for next 5 minutes. [image] Querying basics | Prometheus Prometheus project documentation for Qu…

So I need to do a series of instant queries instead of a range query? And those somehow can be merged into a single heatmap?

Using the exact function combination from the article is an even worse result: [Screenshot 2025-06-25 at 9.47.21 AM]

are you in the POC stage of using prometheus? or are you open to using another TSDB

I’m open to looking at another TSDB. We currently use Alloy/Prometheus/Loki/Tempo/Grafana, but other than node exporter on some servers we have not invested a lot of time in custom development.

Which TSDB(s) should I consider?

can you please share some sample data? maybe as csv and obfuscated if sensitive

CSV of the data in my example above: sample histogram data · GitHub

Calculate delta temporality from classic histogram

Grafana Prometheus

smaddock June 25, 2025, 2:48pm 6

Using the exact function combination from the article is an even worse result:

Topic		Replies	Views
Guidance with Histogram data in Gauge and Heatmap Prometheus	3	5124	March 27, 2018
Heatmap From Pre-Bucketed Prometheus Data Prometheus	1	6465	November 5, 2019
Creating a histogram bar chart with Prometheus Data Source Prometheus	0	1340	February 12, 2020
Histogram graph data shifted by 2 minute? Prometheus	2	2215	October 29, 2018
Heatmap using Prometheus Histogram? Grafana	4	3134	March 24, 2023

Calculate delta temporality from classic histogram

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