Including timestamp in metric

Hello,

I’d like to include the timestamp in the metric according to the Prometheus documentation: https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/exposition_formats/

metric_name [
  "{" label_name "=" `"` label_value `"` { "," label_name "=" `"` label_value `"` } [ "," ] "}"
] value [ timestamp ]

I’d like that feature for the following reason: Some exporters take a while to gather certain information. Therefore I would like to run them asynchronously, not only when the endpoint is scraped. To guarantee that the metrics are as accurate as possible, I’d like to include the timestamp with the metric.

Currently, I don’t think this is possible.

Thanks

[hollodotme]

I have question regarding the timestamp value type. The prometheus docs say:

The timestamp is an int64 (milliseconds since epoch, i.e. 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC, excluding leap seconds), represented as required by Go’s ParseInt() function.

Looking at the python parser and its tests floats (I think microseconds) are used for the timestamps.

What is the right format / type? Am I missing something?

[spaceone]

A workaround is proposed here: https://github.com/prometheus/client_python/issues/588#issuecomment-1054724554