"Wide events" describe a structure/schema for incoming data on the "write path" to a system. That's fine. But that data always needs to be transformed, specialized, for use-case specific "read paths" offered by that same system, in order to be efficient. You can "do wide events" on ingest but you always need to transform them to specific (narrow? idk) events/metrics/summarizations/etc. for the read paths, that's the whole challenge of the space.
You…don’t? This is why tools like ClickHouse and Honeycomb are starting to grow, you just aggregate what you need at query time, and the cost to query is not usually too expensive. The tradeoff is each event has a higher per-unit cost, but this is often the more favorable tradeoff.
> you just aggregate what you need at query time, and the cost to query is not usually too expensive
The entire challenge of observability systems is rooted in the fact that the volume of input data (wide events) on the write path, is astronomically larger than what can ever be directly evaluated by any user-facing system on the read path. Data transformation and specialization and etc. is the whole ball-game. If you can build something directly on top of raw wide-events, and it works for you, that's cool, but it means that you're operating at trivial and non-representative scale.
