> If I transmit a statsd metric representing "CPU usage", I am still sampling it. In practice this is how everyone does it, but in theory it should be possible

> If I transmit a statsd metric representing "CPU usage", I am still sampling it. In practice this is how everyone does it, but in theory it should be possible to have a non-sampled view of CPU usage (defined as "time process is scheduled onto a CPU"). With the right kernel introspection, you could represent it as a series of spans covering each time slice where the process is scheduled. Perhaps with a concept of a "currently ongoing span" to account for the current time slice. Do I think this would be more useful than the typical sampled metric? Probably not, outside some niche performance analysis workflows. But my point is that CPU is not actually continuous, and I struggle to think of any metric which cannot be represented without sampling if you REALLY need it.