OpenTelemetry Metric Gauge negative metric value?

[bobby-driggs]

I have a situation where I was attempting to implement a "stoplight" style gauge. where "red" would be -1, "yellow" would be 0, and "green" would be 1.

I noticed on the .NET Aspire Dashboard, this metric never shows a -1. It would appear that any negative value is automatically dropped? I dont see it on the Graph or the Table view.

I confirmed via the Otel Console exporter that the value that is being captured is a negative value - including two different tags:

Metric Name: sessions.state
(2025-08-12T15:12:06.4896761Z, 2025-08-12T15:14:54.5938572Z] session_id: Tag1LongGauge
Value: -1
Instrumentation scope (Meter):
Name: Service.Services.SessionStateService
Resource associated with Metric:
service.name: monitor-service
service.instance.id: npncyrgw
telemetry.sdk.name: opentelemetry
telemetry.sdk.language: dotnet
telemetry.sdk.version: 1.12.0
(2025-08-12T15:12:06.4896761Z, 2025-08-12T15:14:54.5938572Z] session_id: Tag2LongGauge
Value: 1
Instrumentation scope (Meter):
Name: Service.Services.SessionStateService
Resource associated with Metric:
service.name: monitor-service
service.instance.id: npncyrgw
telemetry.sdk.name: opentelemetry
telemetry.sdk.language: dotnet
telemetry.sdk.version: 1.12.0

Searching online, it seems that negative values should be something that is supported for Gauging. Is there a way to get this to work with the Aspire Dashboard?

EDIT TO ADD:

It also seems like the Histogram metric is capped to 10,000 ? Any way to give ranges to these for Aspire?

[engineering87]

Hello @bobby-driggs,
Aspire Dashboard filters out negative gauge values, so -1 won’t display even though Otel captures it. You can try to remap your stoplight values to non-negative numbers.

[davidfowl]

cc @JamesNK