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Add detail about explicit histogram buckets and boundaries (open-tele…
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…metry#1933)

* Add detail about explicit histogram buckets and boundaries

* reword bucket counts

* nit

Co-authored-by: Josh Suereth <joshuasuereth@google.com>
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jmacd and jsuereth authored Sep 22, 2021
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Expand Up @@ -398,6 +398,21 @@ denotes Delta temporality where accumulated event counts are reset to zero after
and a new aggregation occurs. Cumulative, on the other hand, continues to
aggregate events, resetting with the use of a new start time.

Bucket counts are optional. A Histogram without buckets conveys a
population in terms of only the sum and count, and may be interpreted
as a histogram with single bucket covering `(-Inf, +Inf)`.

Bucket upper-bounds are inclusive (except for the case where the
upper-bound is +Inf) while bucket lower-bounds are exclusive. That is,
buckets express the number of values that are greater than their lower
bound and less than or equal to their upper bound. Importers and
exporters working with OpenTelemetry Metrics data are meant to
disregard this specification when translating to and from histogram
formats that use inclusive lower bounds and exclusive upper bounds.
Changing the inclusivity and exclusivity of bounds is an example of
worst-case Histogram error; users should choose Histogram boundaries
so that worst-case error is within their error tolerance.

### Summary (Legacy)

[Summary](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-proto/blob/v0.9.0/opentelemetry/proto/metrics/v1/metrics.proto#L268)
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