They store scalar values in that they are binary encoded data structures. But the data structures they actually encode at the cell levels they histogram bins i

They store scalar values in that they are binary encoded data structures. But the data structures they actually encode at the cell levels they histogram bins in a datastructure optimized for histogram calculations (in the Circonus case log linear histograms encoded as 3 values[0]). These histogram structures are optimized for fast re-aggregation and quantization across time/dimension. By optimizing for histograms first and plugging things like counts and gauges into them (rather than the reverse for something like Prometheus) they get around a lot of the bad statistics and expensive query calculations that other metrics systems have. This is different than say how Prometheus stores histograms where it treats the bucket boundaries as a dimension in a fixed bucket histogram and the cell as the count of items in that bucket. [0] https://www.circonus.com/2018/05/effective-management-of-high-volume-numeric-data-with-histograms/ https://www.circonus.com/2018/05/effective-management-of-hig...