Can fluentbit forward fluentbit_metrics as plain text instead of a JSON object to a port? - fluent-bit

Question

I am trying to send fluentbit metrics to an external source for processing. My understanding from the documentation is that the fluentbit_metrics input is intended to be used with output plugins that are for specific telemetry solutions like Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, etc. However, for my purposes, I cannot actually use any of those solutions and instead have to use a different bespoke metrics solution. For this to work, I would like to just send lines of text to a port that my metrics solution is listening on.
I am trying to use the fluentbit forward output to send data to this endpoint, but I am getting an error in response from my metrics solution because it is receiving a big JSON object which it can't parse. However, when I output the same fluentbit_metrics input to a file or to stdout, the contents of the file is more like what I would expect, where each metric is just a line of text. If these text lines were what was being sent to my metrics endpoint, I wouldn't have any issue ingesting them.
I know that I could take on the work to change my metrics solution to parse and process this JSON map, but before I do that, I wanted to check if this is the only way forward for me. So, my question is, is there a way to get fluentbit to send fluentbit_metrics to a forward output where it does not convert the metrics into a big JSON object? Is the schema for that JSON object specific to prometheus? Is there a reason why the outputs differ so substantially?
Here is a copy of an example config I am using with fluentbit:
[SERVICE]
# This is a commented line
Daemon off
log_level info
log_file C:\MyFolder\fluentlog.txt
flush 1
parsers_file .\parsers.conf
[INPUT]
name fluentbit_metrics
tag internal_metrics
scrape_interval 2
[OUTPUT]
Name forward
Match internal_metrics
Host 127.0.0.1
Port 28232
tag internal_metrics
Time_as_Integer true
[OUTPUT]
name stdout
match *
And here is the output from the forward output plugin:
{
"meta": {
"cmetrics": {},
"external": {},
"processing": {
"static_labels": []
}
},
"metrics": [
{
"meta": {
"ver": 2,
"type": 0,
"opts": {
"ns": "fluentbit",
"ss": "",
"name": "uptime",
"desc": "Number of seconds that Fluent Bit has been running."
},
"labels": [
"hostname"
],
"aggregation_type": 2
},
"values": [
{
"ts": 1670884364820306500,
"value": 22,
"labels": [
"myHostName"
],
"hash": 16603984480778988994
}
]
}, etc.
and here is the output of the same metrics from stdout:
2022-12-12T22:02:13.444100300Z fluentbit_uptime{hostname="myHostName"} = 2
2022-12-12T22:02:11.721859000Z fluentbit_input_bytes_total{name="tail.0"} = 1138
2022-12-12T22:02:11.721859000Z fluentbit_input_records_total{name="tail.0"} = 12
2022-12-12T22:02:11.444943400Z fluentbit_input_files_opened_total{name="tail.0"} = 1