I am trying to understand the behavior of queue_size in Alloy/OTel Collector when the exporter is down

[ashish-sparrows]

Setup

Processor:

otelcol.storage.file "local_file_storage" {
  directory = "C:\\temp\\alloy"
  
  compaction {
    on_start   = false

    on_rebound = true
    
    rebound_needed_threshold_mib = 2
    
    rebound_trigger_threshold_mib = 1
  }
}

otelcol.exporter.otlphttp "central_otlp_service_exporter" {
  client {
    endpoint = env("GRAFANA_ALLOY_OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT")
    auth     = otelcol.auth.basic.central_otlp_service_basic_auth.handler
    tls {
      insecure = false
    }
  }

  retry_on_failure {
    enabled          = true
    initial_interval = "5s"
    max_interval     = "30s"
    max_elapsed_time = "0s" 
  }

  sending_queue {
    enabled       = true
    queue_size    = 10 
    storage       = otelcol.storage.file.local_file_storage.handler
  }
}

all other config is set to default

Test Scenario I am trying:
Log emit rate: 1 log/second
Exporter target: CloudWatch Logs
OTEL endpoint is down until I see the queue full error message in alloy

Observations
Exporter fully down

Logs are emitted at 1 log/sec

Around 90 logs are being stored in local storage
My understanding is that since the queue_size is only 10, there should be only 10 records in the log file
And from 11th on, logs should be dropped because (max_elapsed_time = 0) and queue is also full

is my understanding is correct?
can you please provide if there is any document which explain this in details with some examples

Thanks in Advance
Ashish Agrawal