hive-metric counters are delta by default; VictoriaMetrics has no
delta-to-cumulative processor of its own and official guidance is to
feed it cumulative. Converting at the hive tier, closest to the
origin, means every downstream consumer (swarm tier, VictoriaMetrics,
upstream) sees ordinary cumulative counters and existing PromQL idioms
(rate()/increase()) keep working unchanged. Default config is a no-op
passthrough for anything already cumulative (Claude Code's own export,
hostmetrics, Prometheus scrapes) -- verified against the actual
collector binary (otelcol-contrib validate), not assumed: an empty
config validates clean, an invalid key is rejected.
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