docs: explain idle time rates above 1 for logical_disk and physical_disk (#2770)

Co-authored-by: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Signed-off-by: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Jan-Otto Kröpke
2026-10-16 21:33:09 +02:00
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co-authored by Claude
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@@ -37,6 +37,16 @@ If given, a disk needs to *not* match the exclude regular expression in order fo
| windows_physical_disk_read_write_latency_seconds_total | The time, in seconds, of the average disk transfer (PhysicalDisk.AvgDiskSecPerTransfer) | Counter | disk |
### Idle time
`windows_physical_disk_idle_seconds_total` is the `% Idle Time` counter, converted to seconds: the cumulative idle time of the disk.
Windows updates it unevenly while the disk is busy and catches up afterwards, so the rate over a short window can exceed 1
right after a burst of I/O. Performance Monitor also shows values above 100%.
The errors mostly cancel out over longer windows, but can still push a 5m rate slightly above 1.
Clamp the rate to 1 when you derive the busy time from it:
```
1 - clamp_max(rate(windows_physical_disk_idle_seconds_total[5m]), 1)
```
### Example metric
Query the rate of write operations to a disk
```