Issue with Prometheus Query in Grafana

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1

Hello Grafana Community,

I’m currently facing an issue with a Prometheus query in Grafana and would appreciate any insights or suggestions.

I have a metric nginx_request_status_code_total that tracks the number of requests with different status codes. When I query the metric without specifying a time range, I get results as expected. However, when I add a time range, such as [1h], [10m], or [15m], the query returns no data.

Here’s an example of the query that works without a time range:

sum(nginx_request_status_code_total{status_code="404"})

And here’s the query that does not return data when I add a time range:

sum(nginx_request_status_code_total{status_code="404"}[1h])

Things I’ve checked:

  • Verified the metric name (nginx_request_status_code_total) and label (status_code="404") are correct.
  • Ensured Prometheus is scraping metrics and Grafana can access Prometheus data sources.
  • Reviewed Prometheus logs for any errors or warnings.

Despite these checks, I’m unable to retrieve data when specifying a time range. Could anyone please advise on what might be causing this issue or suggest additional troubleshooting steps?

Thank you in advance for your help!

2

Hi,
Since you are looking for the sum over a period of time, the time interval ([1h]) converts the query into a range type and to process the sum over this you should first wrap it in a rate, irate or increase function and then put sum over that. Something like this:

  • sum(increase(nginx_request_status_code_total{status_code="404"}[1h]))
  • sum(rate(nginx_request_status_code_total{status_code="404"}[1h]))

Additionally you could also try changing the time interval, I have personally faced instances wherein the time interval was smaller than my scrape interval and hence there was no data.

Cheers

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