Latency metric on topics with few offsets

[mwarkentin]

I created some global monitors using the sentry arroyo latency and a fallback for sbc arroyo latency (since there are data team monitors as well).

I'm attempting to use Datadog's no data reporting to have a fallback for when the consumer is broken and stops reporting latency entirely, however it seems like on topics with little activity, we also stop reporting latency.

I suspect this is because Arroyo records this metric during commit.

Would it be possible to record a latency metric of 0 if there is no new offsets to process? This makes more sense to me than not recording a metric at all and would improve this use case.

Are there any reasons not to do this?