as described in devdocs/expr.md, metrictank resets the consolidation function when it passes a "special" function. a special function is one that changes the nature of the data on a fundamental level. Such as summarize, perSecond, derivative, integral We explain the reasoning for that behavior with a few examples.
summarize(consolidateBy(statsd.count,"sum"),"24h","sum")
- the inputs to summarize, if we need to consolidate, can be summed, because we'll sum the data anyway
- but if we want to see daily sums, and maxdatapoints dictates that we must consolidate at runtime we don't want the points summed together into buckets of arbitrary N-day-size buckets.