On a related subject, a common point of confusion is why functions such as increase and delta produce non-integer results. This point is briefly explained in the documentation, but is worth expanding upon. Since Prometheus collects data on a regular basis (defined in the scrape_interval configuration), when a query asks for a range of samples, the window limits for that range usually don't neatly align with the timestamps of the returned data. These functions extrapolate what the result would be like if the data points matched the time window. They do this by calculating the precise result with the samples provided, and then multiplying that result by the ratio of the time window over the interval between the first and last data point, effectively scaling the result to the requested range.