What should you do with counters that have labels?

Prometheus counters with labels can causemissing time seriesin queries if some label combinations have not yet been observed. To ensure visibility and continuity, therecommended best practiceis toinstantiate counters with all expected label values at application startup, even if their initial value is zero.

This ensures that every possible labeled time series is exported consistently, which helps when dashboards or alerting rules expect the presence of those series. For example, if a counter like http_requests_total{method="POST",status="200"} has not yet received a POST request, initializing it with a zero ensures it is still exposed.

Option A is incorrect — label values should never be encoded into metric names.

Option B adds redundancy and does not solve the initialization issue.

Option D is discouraged; counters should reset naturally upon restart, reflecting Prometheus’sephemeral metric model.