At their core these systems are basically specialized column stores, they have complete different read/write patterns to something like ES. The basic query unit for example is always going to be the scan, I'm not even aware of any monitoring system with some kind of secondary index capability. ES supports a bunch of nice result aggregation stuff on top of Lucene, whereas these systems are primarily /built for/ this use case
What's interesting about some of the more modern monitoring systems like M3 and Prometheus is that they have a reverse index on top of the column store entries to very quickly find the relevant metrics for a multi-dimensional query.
