What Interval parameter means?

[glebteterin]

From the comment "the resolution of the metric" it's not very clear what exactly the parameter means and what values should I provide?

[glebteterin]

Also a bit off-topic, but is there any documentation on the https://grafana.com/cloud/metrics API, particularly where it says something about parameters above?

[Dieterbe]

generally for any metric, you repeatedly measure it every x seconds.
for example measure cpu usage every 10 seconds. that's what interval is. if there is missing the data, the system will add null points every 10 seconds.
our graphite stack is compatible (and partially based on) open source graphite, so the same docs apply https://graphite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/render_api.html ; though it doesn't cover our ingestion api. we are working on better docs more geared towards our platform.

[glebteterin]

Thanks, @Dieterbe

[OscarVanL]

Hi @Dieterbe,

I'm trying to ingest data from an IoT device that has a very flaky LoRaWAN connection, as a result, messages may send every 2 minutes in ideal conditions, or as late as every 5 minutes in poor conditions.

For this reason, I can't reliably give an interval parameter. What would you suggest?

[Dieterbe]

aim for the ideal interval of 2 minutes. if points are missed or skipped, they'll show as null values, which is typically the desired behavior, and you can then "clean up" the data at query time (keepLastValue() etc)

[omrifried]

I am having issues with the integration between the interval parameter and keepLastValue(). I am using Grafana Cloud and pushing metrics via a similar script as the Graphite python script. I set my interval parameter to be 10 seconds but only push metrics every 60 seconds. From my understanding, Graphite will populate the metrics with NULL until the next collection (after 60 seconds) since I specified interval to be 10 seconds. However, keepLastValue() is not working and the metric disappears on my dashboard until the next collection (60 seconds later) and it says the metric is "not found". How can I fix this?