Explore documentation
  1. Welcome to Telemetry 👋
  2. Quick start guide
  3. Wide events vs. metrics
  4. Ingesting data
    1. Better Stack collector
    2. Vector
    3. OpenTelemetry
    4. Ingesting via HTTP API
    5. Ingesting metrics
    6. Ingesting logs
    7. Migrating to Better Stack
  5. Using the product
    1. AI SRE ↗
    2. MCP server ↗
    3. Transforming ingested data
    4. Querying data
    5. Tracing
    6. Alerts
  6. Telemetry API
    1. Getting an API token
    2. Sources & collectors
      1. Sources API
      2. Collectors API
      3. Metrics API
        1. List all metrics GET
        2. Create a metric POST
        3. Update a metric PATCH
        4. Remove a metric DELETE
      4. Source groups API
    3. Dashboards
    4. Explorations
    5. Alerts API
    6. Connections API
    7. Query API ↗
  7. Alternative to
    1. Lightstep

Update a metric

Updates an existing metric. At least one of name, sql_expression, type, or aggregations must be provided.

PATCH https://telemetry.betterstack.com/api/v2/sources/{source_id}/metrics/{id}

URL parameters

source_id
required integer

Source for which to update a metric

id
required string

ID of the metric you want to update

Headers

Authorization
required string

Bearer $TOKEN

Body parameters

name
string

Metric name

sql_expression
string

SQL expression to use for the metric

aggregations
array

Aggregations to apply to the metric.
Valid aggregations are avg, count, uniq, max, min, anyLast, sum, p50, p90, p95, p99

type
string

Metric type.
Valid types are string_low_cardinality, int64_delta, float64_delta, datetime64_delta, and boolean

build_type
string

How to process historical data. new_data (default) applies the change going forward. historical_logs reprocesses retained logs.

200

Response body

{
  "data": {
    "id": "g-123",
    "type": "metric",
    "attributes": {
      "name": "level",
      "sql_expression": "JSONExtract(raw, 'level', 'Nullable(String)')",
      "aggregations": [],
      "type": "string_low_cardinality"
    }
  }
}
404

The source does not have a metric with the given ID

Response body

{
  "errors": "Resource with provided ID was not found"
}

Example cURL

Example
curl --request PATCH \
  --url https://telemetry.betterstack.com/api/v2/sources/123/metrics/g-456 \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data '{
    "name": "log_type"
  }'


Previous article

Create a metric

Next article

Remove a metric