Stacked Bar Chart with Increase(Counter[time])

  • What Grafana version and what operating system are you using?
    Grafana 8.3.1 (I tried with 9.1.7 as well)

  • What are you trying to achieve?
    I have different Counter prometheus metrics per Objects.
    I want to create a Stacked Bar Chart over the time, an “Acitvity per Day Panel”.
    A counter is incremented each time an object is used on back end side.

My data looks like :

object_usage_count_total{object="tc 1"} 2.0
object_usage_count_total{object="tc5"} 3.0
  • How are you trying to achieve it?
round(increase(object_usage_count_total[5m]))

I’m using this prometheus query with Min Step 5m (I’m using 5m for test purpose even if my goal is 1d)
And I’ve selected Stacked Bar Chart

  • What happened?

I have the following result at this moment :


Which is pretty nice, it looks like what I want, except that the first usage of an object is never shown.
For this example I used 3 time TC5 and 2 time TC1. And as we can see there’s a total of 2 activity for TC5 and 1 activity for TC1.

I think that I know what is the origin of this issue.
When an object is used for the first time, the created counter have the value 1 as we can see on the image below.
The value 0 never exists for this counter, so for the “increase” method the value didn’t increase by one.

I thought of initializing the counter to 0 before, but the problem is that a new object can be created at any moment, and when it’s created, it is automatically used once. The state “used 0 time” doesn’t really exist.

I have 2 questions:

Is it considered as a bug or is the behavior of “increase” like this on purpose ?

Do you have a solution that might work in my case ?

Thanks

(Maybe I’m on the wrong category sorry, I didn’t found anything related to “increase”)

  • Did you receive any errors in the Grafana UI or in related logs? If so, please tell us exactly what they were.
    Nothing

  • Did you follow any online instructions? If so, what is the URL?
    Yes, just saw on every “Activity per day” topics that “increase” is what I need.
    But no specific URL to provide.