I ran a query like this:

get virtual_machine:vcpu_usage | filter timestamp >= @2025-03-03T20:50:11.000 && timestamp < @2025-03-03T21:00:31.000 && instance_id == "cd434a6f-815f-446d-9e32-744c991b25ed" && state == "run" | align mean_within(10s) | group_by [vcpu_id], sum

And got errors like the below despite the manifest presence of align mean_within(10s) in the query. These are dogfood request IDs.

{
  "request_id": "38890de5-8cf3-49ab-bdf5-710956f0bb38",
  "error_code": "InvalidRequest",
  "message": "Input tables to a `group_by` must be aligned"
}

{
  "request_id": "5252c89f-07a6-44ba-b77f-373e6218fbce",
  "error_code": "InvalidRequest",
  "message": "Input tables to a `group_by` must be aligned"
}

I see that the error comes from here. I will do more investigation and really nail down exactly what query I ran to get it, but I don't think it's an issue with query construction. You can see that the console code to generate queries is written so that there is always an align mean_within(<interval>) present.

This was an instance that had recently started, so I wonder if the problem was that there were no timeseries in the table, which does get you an is_aligned value of false.

Update: yep, I can systematically reproduce the error by changing the time range so that it doesn't contain any data points. This works for a time range both before and after the lifetime of the instance.