The "the health check itself made the cluster less reliable" pattern shows up far beyond Kafka, and your GC-pauses-to-restart-storm chain is the sharpest example of the monitor and the monitored sharing a fate. The failure mode I'd want a follow-up on: how do you notice when the piggybacked statistics themselves stop arriving? If the callback stalls silently, you end up with the calmest dashboard of all - the one that says nothing is wrong because nothing is being measured. Did you end up putting a watchdog on the absence of callbacks, or is staleness just accepted as a blind spot?