Proposal

Currently prometheus metrics have two type of suffixes:

• the unit: it bounces metrics that set the unit field but with a name that doesn't end with that same unit
• the type: counters can end with _total and histograms with _bucket

We've been playing with type-and-unit-labels and the suffixes now feel unnecessary since the type and unit are available as labels. Additionally, these suffixes prevent having metrics that support the OTEL SemConv.

For histograms, the type suffix could still make sense since you need to differentiate the bucket/sum/count but this is not true for native histograms with which you only get a single metric and use functions to get the sum/count.

Would it make sense to have a feature to allow not setting the unit suffix and removing the type suffix?

cc @rbizos @ArthurSens