[hagen1778]

> The value is that I can compare data to months if not years ago.

I'd say it is quite specific case. The most important data is recent data. Monitoring system should help you to identify current issues. Be reliable and performant, so you don't spend minutes waiting for response while your production is on fire.

Second in importance is data for last N days. The period when you analyze recent changes (updates, releases) or incidents. You want this data to be easy to get and pivot, changing queries ad-hoc and get results immediately. So root cause analysis won't take days of work.

Data older than month is rarely accessed. It is usually used for capacity planning, retrospective analysis - things which you do once in 3 months, or even once a year. Here, you can afford long, slow queries.

Both, VictoriaMetrics and Mimir, do a lot to provide fast access to the recent data: to get it stored and to get it ready for queries.