Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Add comment about CUMULATIVE edge case #143

Closed
MrAlias opened this issue Apr 27, 2020 · 2 comments · Fixed by #195
Closed

Add comment about CUMULATIVE edge case #143

MrAlias opened this issue Apr 27, 2020 · 2 comments · Fixed by #195
Labels
release:required-for-ga Must be resolved before GA release, or nice to have before GA spec:metrics

Comments

@MrAlias
Copy link
Contributor

MrAlias commented Apr 27, 2020

One edge case that probably we should document is if one implementation decides to use CUMULATIVE and resets the start_time every export interval making this type essentially a DELTA. What should we recommend/do when in this case?

Originally posted by @bogdandrutu in #140

@MrAlias MrAlias changed the title Add comment about CUMULATIVE rest edge case Add comment about CUMULATIVE edge case Apr 27, 2020
@jmacd
Copy link
Contributor

jmacd commented May 4, 2020

It's not clear why we should be concerned about this. This looks like a valid transformation, although it is sure to cause performance pains in some systems, for two reasons:

  1. The client will have to remember the last value to correctly transform the cumulative into the delta representation.
  2. A server that expects cumulative inputs will see each delta as a new timeseries, unless it has code to convert deltas back to cumulatives by comparing start_times and appending when possible.

Nevertheless, it's possible to reconstruct the correct state of the world from the data in this case. WAI?

@bogdandrutu
Copy link
Member

My idea was just to add a statement that clarifies that this is valid but not recommended.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
release:required-for-ga Must be resolved before GA release, or nice to have before GA spec:metrics
Projects
None yet
3 participants