Just hit an issue where the http writer got a timeout exception from our metrics relay which may have been backed up or had a hiccup. This line closed the http writer which made it so metrics could not report for the rest of the JVM processes lifetime.

Is there a particular reason the writers are closed here? That makes it so they can't recover. I think the writers should be able to handle their own failures and it seems like they already can. The HTTP writer will just get a new http connection and try again on the next pass. Once its closed it just fails forever.