Incremental and absolute metrics and missing finalizers

[johannesfloriangeiger]

Question

In the scope of #24655 I came across something I am not entirely clear about: Various metric sinks are normalizing metrics by transforming absolute into incremental or vice versa, specifically the AWS CloudWatch Metric sink transforms absolute counters into incremental ones - but that leads to the Buffer of the Sink not clearing up as the first absolute counter will be dropped (i.e., creating the baseline) and only the follow up counters then get emitted as increments compared with the baseline. A solution is to manually mark the finalizers of the dropped metrics as "Delivered" in the Sink but my confusion comes from the fact that I don't see other metric sinks having a similar logic in place, instead they just normalize metrics and can somehow deal with the dropped metric.

So, how do the other sinks are dealing with that, is the AWS CloudWatch Metric sink perhaps outdated or uses a deprecated mechanism?

Vector Config

data_dir = "."

[sources.static_metrics]
type = "static_metrics"
metrics = [
    { name = "test_metric_0", kind = "absolute", tags = { }, value.counter.value = 42 },
    { name = "test_metric_1", kind = "absolute", tags = { }, value.counter.value = 42 },
    { name = "test_metric_2", kind = "absolute", tags = { }, value.counter.value = 42 },
    { name = "test_metric_3", kind = "absolute", tags = { }, value.counter.value = 42 },
    { name = "test_metric_4", kind = "absolute", tags = { }, value.counter.value = 42 },
    { name = "test_metric_5", kind = "absolute", tags = { }, value.counter.value = 42 },
    { name = "test_metric_6", kind = "absolute", tags = { }, value.counter.value = 42 },
    { name = "test_metric_7", kind = "absolute", tags = { }, value.counter.value = 42 },
    { name = "test_metric_8", kind = "absolute", tags = { }, value.counter.value = 42 },
    { name = "test_metric_9", kind = "absolute", tags = { }, value.counter.value = 42 },
    { name = "test_metric_10", kind = "incremental", tags = { }, value.counter.value = 42 },
    { name = "test_metric_11", kind = "incremental", tags = { }, value.counter.value = 42 },
    { name = "test_metric_12", kind = "incremental", tags = { }, value.counter.value = 42 },
    { name = "test_metric_13", kind = "incremental", tags = { }, value.counter.value = 42 },
    { name = "test_metric_14", kind = "incremental", tags = { }, value.counter.value = 42 },
    { name = "test_metric_15", kind = "incremental", tags = { }, value.counter.value = 42 },
    { name = "test_metric_16", kind = "incremental", tags = { }, value.counter.value = 42 },
    { name = "test_metric_17", kind = "incremental", tags = { }, value.counter.value = 42 },
    { name = "test_metric_18", kind = "incremental", tags = { }, value.counter.value = 42 },
    { name = "test_metric_19", kind = "incremental", tags = { }, value.counter.value = 42 },
]

[sinks.aws_cloudwatch_metrics]
type = "aws_cloudwatch_metrics"
inputs = ["static_metrics"]
default_namespace = "default"
healthcheck.enabled = true
buffer.type = "disk"
buffer.max_size = 2097184

Vector Logs

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