Why does the metrics spec recommend count instead of total for counter metric suffixes?

[emschwartz]

It's probably too late to change this but does anyone know why count was chosen instead of total?

I understand that compatibility with OpenMetrics is not necessarily a goal of the OpenTelemetry project but using a different synonym for something like this seems like an unnecessary divergence. (OpenMetrics requires the _total suffix.)

For context, I'm working on a library that makes it easy to instrument functions with metrics and then writes queries for you to understand the generated data. We have an ongoing discussion here about using OpenTelemetry or OpenMetrics semantic conventions and there are some quite small divergences that force us to make more of a choice than would be ideal.

[trask]

@open-telemetry/wg-prometheus wdyt?

for reference, here's the current OTel spec recommendation to use count

[emschwartz]

I opened an issue to propose changing this here: #3457