Tekton Pipelines v1.10.0: Observability, Evolved

Tekton Pipelines v1.10.0 migrates metrics from OpenCensus to OpenTelemetry, bringing modern observability to your CI/CD pipelines.
By Vincent Demeester, Red Hat |

We’re excited to announce the release of Tekton Pipelines v1.10.0! The headline for this release is a major infrastructure change: the migration from OpenCensus to OpenTelemetry for all metrics instrumentation.

OpenCensus to OpenTelemetry Migration

OpenCensus has been deprecated in favor of OpenTelemetry, and Tekton Pipelines now follows suit. This release migrates all PipelineRun and TaskRun metrics to OpenTelemetry instruments — histograms, counters, and gauges — and updates the underlying Knative dependency to v1.19.

What Changed

  • Infrastructure metrics renamed: Go runtime, Workqueue, and K8s Client metrics move from the tekton_pipelines_controller_ prefix to standard OpenTelemetry/Knative namespaces (e.g., kn_workqueue_*, go_*).
  • New reason label: Duration metrics for PipelineRuns and TaskRuns now include a reason label (e.g., Completed, Succeeded) for more granular breakdown.
  • Removed metrics: tekton_pipelines_controller_reconcile_count and tekton_pipelines_controller_reconcile_latency have been removed. Use kn_workqueue_process_duration_seconds and kn_workqueue_adds_total instead.
  • Preserved compatibility: Core metrics like pipelinerun_total, taskrun_total, and taskruns_pod_latency_milliseconds retain their original names and labels.

What You Need to Do

  1. Update your config-observability ConfigMap to use metrics-protocol: prometheus (or grpc/http) instead of the old metrics.backend-destination. If you were already using Prometheus, no changes are needed.
  2. Update your dashboards:
    • Replace tekton_pipelines_controller_workqueue_* queries with kn_workqueue_*
    • Replace tekton_pipelines_controller_go_* queries with standard go_* metrics
    • Account for the new reason label on duration metrics

See PR #9043 for the full migration table and details.

Other Highlights

New Features

  • SHA-256 support for Git resolver: The Git resolver now validates SHA-256 commit hashes (64 characters), future-proofing for Git v3+ which will use SHA-256 instead of SHA-1. (#9278)

Bug Fixes

  • Pipeline results from failed tasks: Pipeline-level results now correctly include results from failed, cancelled, and timed-out tasks. Previously, results referencing non-successful task outputs were left as unresolved variable strings. (#9367)
  • Pipeline param defaults with context variables: Fixed a bug where PipelineRun validation failed when a pipeline parameter’s default value referenced a non-parameter variable like $(context.pipelineRun.name). (#9386)
  • ResolutionRequest CRD on Kubernetes 1.33+: Removed redundant shortNames from the ResolutionRequest CRD that caused ShortNamesConflict on Kubernetes 1.33+. (#9398)

Get Started

Install or upgrade to v1.10.0:

kubectl apply -f https://infra.tekton.dev/tekton-releases/pipeline/previous/v1.10.0/release.yaml

Check out the full release notes and documentation for more details.

Have questions or feedback? Join us on Tekton Slack or open an issue on GitHub.