I've dealt with this problem too, mostly in trying to log/debug real-time media processing where a log trace equivalent would be long chunks of floating point d

I've dealt with this problem too, mostly in trying to log/debug real-time media processing where a log trace equivalent would be long chunks of floating point data at multiple trace points in the data flow. I came to the same conclusion. Raw bandwidth to your logging endpoint is meaningless when you start dealing with big chunks of information, which is common sense I guess. You need a fast way to digest it into whatever format works for the person reading the log later, and it's tough to make it abstract since how data is interpretted can be quite varied even in the same application.