Monitor schema health with engine.schema_fields: Structure, Drift, and Volatility
If you’ve worked with an observability pipeline, you’ve probably experienced schema problems: a field disappears, a type shifts from string to number, or a new label quietly appears. The causes are everywhere. Different teams adopt different naming conventions. A dependency upgrade changes the shape of a library’s log output. Over time, these small, reasonable decisions compound into schema sprawl: dashboards break, alerts misfire, and teams scramble to find out what happened.