Only export metric value if it was updated

[jleipus]

What am I trying to achieve?

Periodically we start a session. A session increments a counter, e.g. "bytes_received".
Each session has a set of attributes, e.g.:

{
   "type": "type1" // or "type2", "type3", etc.
   "address": "address1" // or "address2", "address3", etc.
}

The possible values of the attributes are a finite, but occasionally increasing list, and there can be many different combinations of said attributes, e.g. { "type1", "address2" }, { "type1", "address3" }, { "type3", "address2" }, ...

I want the value of the counter for a specific session to only be increased for the duration of the session. In some cases, another session with the same set of attributes may be started after some time, in that case, the value should be exported once again.

This is how we currently handle this process:

on initial startup:
    create exporter
    create meterProvider
    set meterProvider

once session starts:
    get meter
    create counter
    for every packet:
        increment counter

This has resulted in there being >100 different counters (and growing) continuously being updated, when in reality, only 0-2 are actually being updated at any given moment.

We use the GRPC exporter writing to an opentelemetry-collector that is then writing to VictoriaMetrics with prometheusremotewrite.

How would I go about implementing such a solution?