I invite your attention to the StatsD telemetry protocol, where:

1. Every single measurement in a timeseries is encoded as a utf-8 string having (roughly) the following format:

  "${name}:${value}|${type}|${tags}"

where name is like "my.long.namespace.and.metric.name", value is a string formatted number, god only knows what type is, and tags is some gigantic comma separated key:value monstrosity.

2. Each and every one of these things is fired off into the ether in the form of a UDP datagram.

3. Whenever the server receives these presumably it gets around sometime to assigning them timestamps and inserts them into a database, not necessarily in that or any other particular order.

"it is the way it is[1]."

[1] https://github.com/statsd/statsd?tab=readme-ov-file#usage