How To Rename Metrics Without Impacting Somebody’s Observabili... Bartłomiej Płotka & Arianna Vespri
Bartłomiej Płotka, Arianna Vespri
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 · Session
Renaming metrics, a seemingly innocuous refactoring task, is a pervasive and often dreaded challenge in modern observability systems. This talk by Bartłomiej Płotka and Arianna Vespri at KubeCon EU addresses the critical problem of how metric renames can silently break production systems, leading to incidents, unreliable dashboards, and failed autoscaling. They highlight that such changes, even minor ones like label value adjustments or unit conversions, can cause significant friction for both metric producers (maintainers fearful of making necessary improvements) and consumers (users whose alerts and dashboards suddenly cease to function correctly).
AI review
This talk by Bartłomiej Płotka and Arianna Vespri presents a truly innovative and pragmatic solution to the long-standing, painful problem of metric renames in observability systems. By leveraging OpenTelemetry schemas and the Weaver CLI, they propose a schema-driven, versioned approach that enables seamless, on-the-fly query-time transformations of metrics, including complex unit conversions. This research offers a robust framework to eliminate operational friction and incidents caused by metric evolution, representing a significant leap forward for anyone operating or developing within a…