[rsanheim]

I think the answer is it doesn't fit in any definition of a _good_ monitoring stack, but we are stuck with it. It has largely become the blessed protocol, specification, and standard for OSS monitoring, along every axis (logging, tracing, collecting, instrumentation, etc)...its a bit like the efforts that resulted in J2EE and EJBs back in the day, only more diffuse and with more varied implementations.

And we don't really have a simpler alternative in sight...at least in the java days there was the disgust and reaction via struts, spring, EJB3+, and of course other languages and communities.

Not sure how we exactly we got into such an over-engineered mono-culture in terms of operations and monitoring and deployment for 80%+ of the industry (k8s + graf/loki/tempo + endless supporting tools or flavors), but it is really a sad state.

Then you have endless implementations handling bits and pieces of various parts of the spec, and of course you have the tools to actually ingest and analyze and report on them.