Docs » Get started with the Splunk Distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector » Collector components » Collector components: Processors » Cumulative to delta processor

Cumulative to delta processor 🔗

The cumulative to delta processor is an OpenTelemetry Collector component that converts monotonic, cumulative sum, and histogram metrics to monotonic metrics with delta aggregation temporality. The supported pipeline type is metrics. See Process your data with pipelines for more information.

Converting metrics from cumulative to delta temporality is useful when sending cumulative histogram data because cumulative histograms are difficult to process in the platform. Since the processor is stateful, don’t use it when sending data from multiple Collector instances. See Considerations about statefulness.

Note

Non-monotonic sums and exponential histograms are not supported.

Get started 🔗

Follow these steps to configure and activate the component:

  1. Deploy the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector to your host or container platform:

  2. Configure the cumulative to delta processor as described in the next section.

  3. Restart the Collector.

Sample configuration 🔗

To activate the cumulative to delta processor, add cumulativetodelta to the processors section of your configuration file, as shown in the following example:

processors:
   cumulativetodelta:
      include:
            metrics:
               - <metric_1_name>
               - <metric_2_name>
               - <metric_n_name>
            match_type: strict
      #
      #  Exclude rules take precedence over include rules
      #
      exclude:
            metrics:
               - ".*metric.*"
            match_type: regexp

Use include and exclude rules to define which metrics you want to convert to delta temporality. If you don’t specify include or exclude lists, the processor converts all cumulative sum or histogram metrics to delta temporality.

To complete the configuration, include the receiver in any pipeline of the service section of your configuration file. For example:

service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
      processors: [cumulativetodelta]

Considerations about statefulness 🔗

Because the cumulative to delta processor calculates delta aggregation using previous values of metrics, it is accurate only if the metric is continuously sent to the same instance of the Collector. The cumulative to delta processor might not work as expected in deployments that use multiple Collector instances.

Settings 🔗

The following table shows the configuration options for the cumulative to delta processor:

Troubleshooting 🔗

If you are a Splunk Observability Cloud customer and are not able to see your data in Splunk Observability Cloud, you can get help in the following ways.

Available to Splunk Observability Cloud customers

Available to prospective customers and free trial users

  • Ask a question and get answers through community support at Splunk Answers .

  • Join the Splunk #observability user group Slack channel to communicate with customers, partners, and Splunk employees worldwide. To join, see Chat groups in the Get Started with Splunk Community manual.

To learn about even more support options, see Splunk Customer Success .