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Most Observer metrics are probed: an agent runs a probe on a schedule and reports the result. Manual metrics are the escape hatch for signals that have no automation, or where the operator wants to control the status surface explicitly.

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When to use a manual metric

  • A signal that has no observability today (a third-party SaaS outage, a vendor dependency, an internal system without instrumentation).
  • A high-level rollup that should follow operator judgment, not a noisy underlying measurement.
  • A service whose status is gated on a contract with a vendor (where Observer should reflect what the vendor says, not what we measure).

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What is different

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How status flips

Two paths set status on a manual metric:
  1. API: POST /api/v1/metrics/{id}/status with {"status": "unhealthy"}. Scope: write:metrics.
  2. Incident impact: when an open incident lists a service with an SLO on a manual metric, that metric auto-flips to mirror the incident severity (minor to degraded, major or critical to unhealthy). On resolve, it is set to healthy.

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Threshold model

Manual metrics carry no thresholds. Status is set directly. The healthy_* / unhealthy_* columns on the metric definition are ignored.
AuditEvery manual transition that changes the status writes an audit log row of action metric.status.set_manually with the actor, source, and old → new status. Useful when reconstructing why a public page rendered a particular status at a given time.