[Internal]: OTel metrics temporality/histogram support is inconsistent across docs pages

[paulb-elastic]

Description

Clarify support of explicit bucket histograms, cumulative and delta histograms.

Highlight if we have still some limitations, such as (ref):

Latency distributions based on histogram values have limited precision due to the fixed boundaries of explicit bucket histograms.

• Managed OTLP on Serverless
  • 🟢 All supported
• Managed OTLP on ECH
  • 🟢 All supported, only for 9.5+ (only by the end of August 2026 as we're pending a change on Managed OTLP to implement a per-target-deployment version exporter usage)
• Elasticsearch OTLP endpoint (metrics) on Serverless
  • 🟢 All supported
• Elasticsearch OTLP endpoint (metrics) on Elasticsearch (on-prem or ECH)
  • 🟢 All supported, only for 9.5+
• EDOT GW collector configuration with OTLP Exporter to target Managed OTLP
  • Depends on the target platform of Managed OTLP (see above) (ref)
• EDOT GW collector with Elasticsearch Exporter (direct to Elasticsearch bulk API) or Managed Bulk API
  • 🟡 Only delta histograms, requires cumulativetodelta (ref)

Longer term, consider a single feature-support matrix (metric feature × ingestion method × environment) so readers don't have to cross-reference multiple partially-applicable pages to work out what's supported.

Resources

Pages involved are

• Docs: Managed OTLP endpoint limitations
• Docs: Compatibility limitations
• Docs: Metric temporality

Which deployment methods does this change impact?

Elastic On-Prem and Cloud (all)

What Elastic Stack release is this request related to?

N/A

Serverless release

No response

Collaboration model

We expect to collaborate on the first draft

Point of contact.

Main contact:

• @felixbarny

Stakeholders:

• @lucabelluccini
• @vinaychandrasekhar
• @frconil

[github-actions]

Elastic Docs AI Menu

Check one box to run an AI workflow for this issue.

• Triage (docs-triage). Status: not started.
• Scope the docs work (docs-scope). Status: not started.

Powered by GitHub Agentic Workflows and docs-actions. For more information, reach out to the docs team.

[paulb-elastic]

@lucabelluccini please feel free to update the main description - you have more context and this was AI generated

[lucabelluccini]

I've updated it (sorry) to focus on the result without not many details on what pages must be updated. I think the main tech leads should validate as I'm not fully able to confirm.

To avoid double work, I would document the state we will get to when we'll deploy the per-target-deployment exporter usage on hosted OTel (end of August)