There are a lot of things I love about Prometheus; its data model is fantastic for monitoring applications and PromQL language is often more expressive than SQL for data retrieval needs you have in the observability space. One thing, though, I hate about Prometheus with a deep passion is the behavior of its rate() and similar functions, deeply rooted in the Prometheus computational model, which I was told by the development team is not likely to change. So What’s the Problem, and Why is it Such a Big Deal? First – the problem. rate() functions give you the rate of change of the time series for the Interval supplied, so rate(mysql_global_status_questions[10s]) will basically give us the average number of MySQL questions over the last 10seconds. Everything is great so far. But what if the resolution of this time series is lower than 10 seconds, for example, if we take mysql_global_status_questions measurement only every minute? In this case, rate() function will return nothing and