OhMyBug

observability

Frozen Metric Served As Current

#90rare4 sightingsfirst seen September 2026

What goes wrong

A publisher stops refreshing a metric or stored reading — it got gated off, failed, hung, or never won the cluster lock — and the last value is neither withdrawn nor cleared. Dashboards and alerts read the frozen number as a current measurement and page, or stay silent, wrongly.

Example

The 'users online' widget's polling loop died after one error; it keeps showing yesterday's number as live.

Not to be confused with

The value was once real and is now frozen — not a missing measurement reported as zero (Unknown measurement becomes certainty) and not a cache left unrefreshed after a successful write (Missed Snapshot Refresh).

Discovered by

Field notes · 1