open-telemetry / open-telemetry/opentelemetry-java
Allow histograms to record measurements with negative values
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- Dominant language
- Java
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Description
Describe the bug
Looking at SdkDoubleHistogram.java we block negative values in histograms despite this being supported under exponential histograms (via negativebuckets).
Is this intentional or just a side effect of the standard storage of Histograms not permitting negative values?
Steps to reproduce
- Emit a negative histogram value
- Get a WARN
- Nothing emitted
What did you expect to see?
Negative values supported
What did you see instead?
Warning message
What version and what artifacts are you using?
N/A
Environment
N/A
Additional context
Add any other context about the problem here.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start in sdk/metrics/src/main/java/io/opentelemetry/sdk/metrics/SdkDoubleHistogram.java at the referenced line and trace how negative measurements are rejected and stored. Compare this behavior with the exponential histogram handling of negativebuckets. Done means negative histogram measurements no longer produce the reported warning or disappear, with behavior consistent with the supported histogram storage model.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- java
- Domain
- observability-sre
- Issue type
- Bug
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 35/100