Understanding No Data Messages

As you leverage the Query Inspector to gain insights on No Data situations, you can use this page to obtain a better understanding of the underlying root causes.

Inspector checks for underlying No Data causes in the below order, which means diagnostics are run sequentially.

Underlying causes

Unable to run Diagnostics due to missing metric name

This scenario occurs when a PromQL query does not contain any metric name, for example:

  • Scalars such as 1024
  • Functions such as hour()

Metric doesn’t exist or was never reported

Check the metric name being used to spot potential spelling/typos mistakes. PromQL Query Explorer, Metrics Explorer, and Dashboards all come with a built-in auto-complete for metric names, which can be used to assist in this task. Alternatively, users can find the same information in the Metrics and Labels in Prometheus Format docs.

If a metric is being provided by an integration, users should check they have been configured as required. This information is outlined in the Monitoring Integration docs.

If the metric is being scrapped by Prometheus and sent to Monitor via Prometheus Remote Write, users should check their Prometheus configuration as outlined in our Prometheus Remote Writedocs.

Metric has not been reported recently within the current selected team scope

This message is raised by Inspector to signal the metric exists, but not within the currently selected team scope. Users facing this error might want to validate whether they are using the correct Team and consider switching to the appropriate one as outlined in our Switching Teams in the UI docs.

Metric last reported data on [date]

This message is raised by Inspector when users are using a time window where the selected metric isn’t reporting any time series. This means its source likely stopped emitting the metric.

Causes for this issue vary, but users are invited to perform the same check as mentioned in Metric doesn’t exist or was never reported.

Additionally, users can leverage our Events page to check for relevant events close to the last reported date as outlined in our Filtering and Searching Events docs. This might allow them to identify what caused the metric to stop being emitted by the source.

Label filtering doesn’t match recent known label values of metric within the last day

Users are invited to check the label filtering doesn’t contain any typos such as {enviroment="production}" or {environment="poduction"}. PromQL Query Explorer, Metrics Explorer, and Dashboards all come with a built-in auto-complete for label names, which can be used to assist in this task.

Additionally, users might be looking for an entity (ie. container, node, host) that no longer exists.

We were not able to identify the reason this query is not returning data

This catch-all message is used when Inspector is not able to determine the underlying reason a query yields No Data.