The ability to visualize data in real-time, which is especially useful for debugging purposes when using an event sourcing architecture like CQRS/ES or DDD style architectures with Event Sourcing etc.. I dislike that there's no way of exporting historical metrics into other databases such as Prometheus / Grafana so you need two separate systems if monitoring both current state (Open TS DB) & past history(Prometheus). It would be nice but it doesn't seem possible at this moment - maybe someone else can confirm? We use open ts db primarily within our own application stack where we have microservices written mostly by us however some 3rd party components are also used too; all these services communicate via events sourced through opentsdb therefore being able to monitor them together makes sense from my point view since they're communicating over common messaging bus anyway!