Metric naming rules

Metric names

All metric names must begin with a letter, an underscore, or a colon. No metric names may begin with lightstep..

Beyond the first character, metric names may contain any of the following characters:

  • Letters: a-z, A-Z
  • Numbers: 0-9
  • Symbols: . / _ - :

If metric names don’t follow these requirements, they will be rejected.

Metric kinds

Cloud Observability supports gauges and two types of counters - deltas and cumulative, known as their kind. If when first ingested a metric name doesn’t match the kind recorded, it will be rejected and an error will be sent back to the client.

Cloud Observability supports:

  • Gauges
  • Deltas
  • Cumulative

If you want to change a metric’s kind, contact Customer Success at support@lightstep.com.

Attributes

There are currently no restrictions on attribute keys or values.

See also

Ingest metrics from Datadog

Ingest Prometheus metrics with an OpenTelemetry Collector on Kubernetes

Ingest metrics from Amazon

Updated Aug 16, 2022