How to setup scrape interval for sql exporter or a collector

[XiangyuZhang-G]

I want to let prometheus scrape sql_exporter every 1 minutes, and I can write it in prometheus.yml

# under global or a special job_name
scrape_interval: 60s

but I don't want to put too much workload to database, so I want to let sql_exporter scrape database every 5 minutes.
How can I setup a scrape interval for sql exporter as a global setting, or a setting for a collector?
Should I use min_interval: 300s as a global setting for sql exporter?

Regards,
Xiangyu

[burningalchemist]

Hey Xiangyu,

Yes, exactly. Setting up min_interval (either globally or per collector configuration, it's up you) makes sql_exporter cache the last successful scraped result for a given interval, which in turn protects queried endpoints from excessive usage.

A new option introduced recently through a dependency is rate limiting. This requires a separate configuration file and details can be found in the Miscellaneous section of the readme.

The key difference is that with the default Prometheus/sql_exporter settings of 1m/5m, you risk scraping duplicate data points. However, enabling rate limiting on sql_exporter will trigger an HTTP 429 response, preventing any data from being stored on the Prometheus side. While duplicates aren’t inherently problematic, it’s worth noting their presence.

Reference: https://github.com/burningalchemist/sql_exporter/blob/master/documentation/sql_exporter.yml

Let me know if you have more questions, I'm happy to assist. 👍

[XiangyuZhang-G]

Good day! Thank you for the explaination about that.
Actually, I wanted to test whether the following content was feasible, but I think you've already let me know in advance that it is.

global:
  ...
target:
  ...
  collectors:
    - collector_1
    - collector_2
collectors:
  - collector_1
    min_interval: 300s
    ...
  - collector_2
    min_interval: 60s
    ...

And also thank you very much for introducing rate limiting.
:)

Regards,
Xiangyu

[burningalchemist]

Yeah, it is. You can have multiple collectors with different guardrail intervals. 👍