group/interval

This check will warn when a rule group declares an interval value greater than 5 minutes.

Prometheus evaluates rules based on the group interval and each evaluation becomes a sample for the resulting time series of a recording rule or a potential alert state change for an alerting rule.

If you set the group interval to a value greater than 5 minutes you will end up with gaps in the recording rule results when querying them, because Prometheus defaults to a 5 minute query lookback. See the staleness section of the Prometheus documentation for details.

Any sample older than 5 minutes is considered stale and won’t be returned by instant queries, so a recording rule that only produces a sample every 10 minutes will appear to be missing for half of that time when queried.

For alerting rules, a long interval will also cause flapping alerts, because the alert state is only re-evaluated every interval. Between evaluations the alert can resolve and then fire again on the next tick, unless you also set keep_firing_for to a value greater than or equal to the group interval.

Example rule group that will trigger this check:

groups:
- name: example
  interval: 10m
  rules:
  - record: job:up:sum
    expr: sum(up) by(job)

To fix this problem, either lower the interval to 5m or less, or, for alerting rules, set keep_firing_for to a value greater than or equal to the group interval.

Configuration

This check doesn’t have any configuration options.

How to enable it

This check is enabled by default.

How to disable it

You can disable this check globally by adding this config block:

checks {
  disabled = ["group/interval"]
}

You can also disable it for all rules inside given file by adding a comment anywhere in that file. Example:

# pint file/disable group/interval

Or you can disable it per rule by adding a comment to it. Example:

# pint disable group/interval

How to snooze it

You can disable this check until given time by adding a comment to it. Example:

# pint snooze $TIMESTAMP group/interval

Where $TIMESTAMP is either use RFC3339 formatted or YYYY-MM-DD. Adding this comment will disable group/interval until $TIMESTAMP, after that check will be re-enabled.