Thank you for your patient and articulate reponses in this thread, 'lobster_johnson'. You make an excellent case. For me, this nails it:

>"if you're measuring some number that can go critically high, you don't make the application issue a warning if it goes above a threshold; rather, you collect the data from the application as a raw number, then perform calculations (e.g. max over the last N mins, sum over the last N mins, total count, etc.) that you compare against the threshold."