[hardwaresofton]

Ah thanks for noting this, I that's exactly the insight I mean here.

Yeah I think the worst case you basically just exfiltrate metrics out to other subsystems (honestly, you could kind of exfiltrate all of this), but the default is pipe heavily compressed stuff to short and long term storage, and some processors for real time... blah blah blah.

Obviously Honeycomb is actually doing the thing and it's not as easy as it sounds, but it feels like if we had all thought like this earlier we might have skipped making a few protocols (zipkin, jaeger, etc), and focused on just data layout (JSON vs protobuf vs GELF, etc) and figuring out what shapes to expect across tools.