Splunk does have margins and I think they're quite high. Same with Datadog (see: all the HN startups that are trying to grab some of that space).

There's a big gap between what it takes for the engineering to work and what all these companies charge.

My point is really more about the engineering time wasted on different protocols and stuff when we could have stuffed everything into minimally structured log lines (and figured out the rest of the insight machinery later). Concretely, that zipkin/jaeger/prometheus protocols and stuff may not have needed to exist, etc.

Once you have logs, you can index them in a variety of ways to turn them into metrics, traces, etc., but having logs as the fundamental primitive is powerful.