# Excluded Prometheus metrics are still fetched by ActiveGate

**URL:** <https://community.dynatrace.com/t/excluded-prometheus-metrics-are-still-fetched-by-activegate/48850>\
**Category:** Troubleshooting\
**Tags:** dynatrace-managed, prometheus, kubernetes\
**Created:** [November 12, 2024, 2:14pm UTC](https://community.dynatrace.com/t/excluded-prometheus-metrics-are-still-fetched-by-activegate/48850 "2024-11-12T14:14:55Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![shahinm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/7ab992/32.png) [@shahinm](https://community.dynatrace.com/u/shahinm)\
**Post date:** [November 12, 2024, 2:14pm UTC](https://community.dynatrace.com/t/excluded-prometheus-metrics-are-still-fetched-by-activegate/48850/1 "2024-11-12T14:14:55Z")

</div>

If you are monitoring Prometheus metrics you may want to exclude some noise metrics or include only selected metrics that provide more business content.

# **Symptoms**

You have excluded some noise Prometheus metrics from ingestion by using a [filtering](https://docs.dynatrace.com/docs/shortlink/monitor-prometheus-metrics#filter-metrics) option, but on the Dynatrace UI (data explorer) the excluded metrics are still visible and AG continues to fetch them.

For example, you have configured the exlusion rule like this

```markup
annotations:
        metrics.dynatrace.com/filter: |
          {
              "mode": "exclude",
              "names":
              [
                  "sample_request_client_request_bytes_count",
                  "sample_request_client_request_bytes_max",
                  "sample_request_client_request_bytes_sum",
                  "sample_request_client_response_bytes_count",
                  "sample_request_client_response_bytes_max",
                  "sample_request_client_response_bytes_sum",
                  ...
              ]
          }

```

# **Resolution**

Looking at the Prometheus metrics from the exposer instance we get this response

```markup
...
# TYPE sample_request_client_request_bytes summary
# HELP sample_request_client_request_bytes Size of requests in bytes
sample_request_client_request_bytes_count{method="POST",route="/api/v1/app/versions/validate"} 1480.0
sample_request_client_request_bytes_sum{method="POST",route="/api/v1/app/versions/validate"} 345163.0
sample_request_client_request_bytes_count{method="POST",route="/api/v1/labels/sample/get"} 115.0
sample_request_client_request_bytes_sum{method="POST",route="/api/v1/labels/sample/get"} 28352.0
...

```

The excluded metrics have an actual name as defined in the “`# TYPE sample_request_client_request_bytes summary`” line in Prometheus (here: `sample_request_client_request_bytes`), and may contain additional sum and count datapoints with different metric keys (here: `sample_request_client_request_bytes_sum` and `sample_request_client_request_bytes_count`).

When applying the configured operations, the filter groups all data points within a metric together and does not consider the other metric keys contained within this metric. So, in this case the filter will only evaluate the actual metric `sample_request_client_request_bytes` but not the `_sum` and `_count` data points included inside.  
If `sample_request_client_request_bytes` is excluded by the filter, the `_sum` and `_count` data points will also be excluded.

Example of how the correct filtering should look like:

```markup
metrics.dynatrace.com/filter: |
          {
              "mode": "exclude",
              "names":
              [
                  ...
                  "sample_request_client_request_bytes",
                  ...
             ]
          }

```