12 March 2026

Event names that survive a rename

Product teams rename events because the old name embarrassed someone in a demo. Warehouse jobs then spend a Friday stitching two histories. In Usage Meter Studio we treat the billed unit as stable and the event name as a pointer that may change.

The artefact is a small alias table: current name, retired name, start date, end date, and the person who approved the cut. We do not backfill the retired name into new events. We do not pretend the UI will remember. The job reads both names during the overlap window and one name after freeze.

GB teams often freeze invoices on a bank-holiday-aware calendar. A rename that lands on a Thursday before a Monday freeze needs the overlap window written down, not implied in a Slack thread. Event Contract Lab is the shorter version of this lecture; the studio adds the join.

If your analytics tool rewrites history on rename, keep a copy of events outside that tool. That sentence has ended more clinic arguments than any diagram we have drawn.