Wide events seem to be "structured logs with focused schemas" (maybe also published in a special way beyond writing to stdout) but most places I've worked would call that "logging" not "wide events".
The reasons we don't use them for everything are as others in the thread say: it's expensive. Metrics (just the numbers, nothing else) can be compressed and aggregated extremely efficiently, hence cheaply. Logs are more expensive due to their arbitrary contents.
The reasons we don't use them for everything are as others in the thread say: it's expensive. Metrics (just the numbers, nothing else) can be compressed and aggregated extremely efficiently, hence cheaply. Logs are more expensive due to their arbitrary contents.
It's all due to expense really.