prometheus / prometheus/prometheus

topk/bottomk tie breaks are inconsistent

Open
#15,908 6 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

component/promql kind/feature priority/Pmaybe
Dominant language
Go
Stars
66.1k
Forks
10.8k
Avg merge
2d 1h
Merged PRs (30d)
131

Description

What did you do?

I ran the query "topk(2, metricA) by (ifName)".

What did you expect to see?

I expect to see consistent results between executions of the same query with identical data.

What did you see instead? Under which circumstances?

The results are not consistent and randomly picks a time series to include in the results when a value tie break needs to be made. Attached are screenshots of the results from two different executions of the same query with identical data.

Image Image
System information

No response

Prometheus version
prometheus, version 2.55.1 (branch: HEAD, revision: 6d7569113f1ca814f1e149f74176656540043b8d)
  build user:       root@194e0f5dd5e8
  build date:       20241106-10:11:03
  go version:       go1.23.2
  platform:         linux/arm64
  tags:             netgo,builtinassets,stringlabels
Prometheus configuration file

Alertmanager version

Alertmanager configuration file

Logs

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the topk and bottomk query operators and reproduce topk(2, metricA) by (ifName) using identical tied data across repeated executions. Trace how tied series are selected, then verify the fix with a regression test showing deterministic results for the same query and data.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
go
Domain
backend
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
45/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.