> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.chronosphere.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Carbon ingestion

Carbon is an approach to sending Graphite data to the Collector. With this method,
Chronosphere Observability Platform treats any Carbon data as pre-aggregated before
it arrives at the Collector. Downsampling rules apply only for long-term retention
with all metrics assumed to be gauges, while the short-term retention data is
persisted as-is.

Only use this when you are certain about the resolution of the data sent, with any
change in resolution causing Observability Platform to persist more metrics. In general,
Chronosphere doesn't recommend this approach of sending Graphite metrics, as the
resolution and control of metrics ingestion is defined by the Carbon clients sending
the data, and not the Collector or backend.

You can enable
[client-side aggregations](/ingest/metrics-traces/collector/addl-metrics#enable-aggregations)
for Carbon. These aggregations reduce network egress and processed writes to
Observability Platform.

To ingest Carbon metrics with the Collector, add the following to the configuration
file under the `push` YAML collection:

```yaml theme={null}
push:
  carbon:
    enabled: true
    listenAddress: 0.0.0.0:3032
    listenProtocol: udp
```

You can configure the following options in the Collector manifest for Carbon.

* `listenAddress`: The address the server listens on. Point clients
  sending Carbon metrics to this address and port. Default: `0.0.0.0:3032`.

  When changing the default port, also update the container ports in the DaemonSet
  manifest to match.
* `listenProtocol`: The protocol the server listens on. The Chronosphere Collector supports
  `udp`, `tcp,` or `tcp/udp` (both protocols on the same port). Default: `udp`.

<Note>
  The Carbon server runs as a UDP server at the provided listen address.
</Note>