A guide to MetricsQL, the query language used by VictoriaMetrics for working with monitoring data. It explains how MetricsQL differs from PromQL, the similar language used by Prometheus.

Use it to write, review, and adapt MetricsQL queries, including rollups, label filters, templates, and VictoriaMetrics query API options.

It helps prevent incorrect results when a PromQL query behaves differently in VictoriaMetrics. It also documents MetricsQL features that PromQL does not have.

metricsql — Skill for Claude Code by xobotyi

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add xobotyi/cc-foundry --skill metricsql

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/xobotyi/cc-foundry

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install grafana, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 7 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/xobotyi/cc-foundry/metricsql.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/xobotyi/cc-foundry/metricsql)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/xobotyi/cc-foundry/metricsql"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/xobotyi/cc-foundry/metricsql.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Per session 90 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 2,977 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits

NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026

How audits are shown

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00090	$0.02977
Opus 5	$0.00045	$0.01489
Sonnet 5	$0.00018	$0.00595
Haiku 4.5	$0.00009	$0.00298

Measured 7d ago against content hash dcf9db1117ef, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

metricsql scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/grafana/skills/metricsql/SKILL.md · 241 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 241 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

MetricsQL

VictoriaMetrics PromQL superset. Syntactically backwards-compatible; semantically different for a subset of queries. Lead with the diffs — that's where users get burned. PromQL fundamentals live in the sibling promql skill; this covers only what PromQL doesn't.

References

Behavioral diffs from PromQL — [${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/behavioral-diffs.md] rate/increase/delta/changes diffs, _prometheus-suffixed variants, scalar/instant-vector unification, NaN handling, name retention, implicit conversions, auto-aligned subqueries, default_rollup lookback, staleness markers.
MetricsQL-only extensions — [${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/extensions.md] Rollup family, WITH templates, multiple-or filters, default/if/ifnot ops, group_left(*) prefix, keep_metric_names, [Ni] step, numeric suffixes, aggregate limit N, boundsLabel, fractional durations, Graphite, multi-line.
Full function catalog — [${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/functions-catalog.md] All rollup, transform, label-manipulation, aggregate functions by category, with PromQL/MetricsQL provenance.
Query API enhancements — [${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/api-enhancements.md] extra_label, extra_filters[], round_digits, limit, timestamp formats, stats response, cluster vmselect URL layout, multi-tenancy.

Read the relevant reference before proceeding.

What MetricsQL Is

Strict syntactic superset of PromQL — every valid PromQL parses as MetricsQL.
Not semantic superset — rate, increase, delta, changes differ.
_prometheus-suffixed variants give byte-parity: rate_prometheus, increase_prometheus, delta_prometheus, changes_prometheus.
Implemented by vmselect (cluster) or single-node binary; exposed via standard /api/v1/query and /api/v1/query_range.

The Five Behavioral Diffs That Bite

Lookbehind anchor. rate/increase use the last sample before the window for the first delta; Prometheus doesn't. For increase(metric[$__interval]) on a slow counter, Prometheus loses one delta per window. Use rate_prometheus/increase_prometheus for parity.
No extrapolation. Returns actual measured delta; Prometheus extrapolates to window edges, producing fractional results from integer counters. Affects alerts comparing increase() to integer thresholds.
Scalar = instant vector without labels. Prometheus's scalar/instant-vector distinction collapses. scalar(metric) coercion rarely needed; arithmetic on aggregation results works.
NaN drop. (-1)^0.5 returns empty in MetricsQL; Prometheus returns a NaN series. Grafana renders identically; programmatic consumers see different shapes.
Metric names retained for safe functions. min_over_time(foo), round(foo), abs(foo) keep foo. Prometheus strips.

Read the full file on GitHub · 241 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

7d ago First seen · 241 lines · 90 tokens per session scan A dcf9db1117ef

Subscribe to this mod's changes

metricsql is a skill published in the GitHub repository xobotyi/cc-foundry (20 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 90 tokens to every session and 2,977 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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