diff --git a/stackpacks/suse-observability/includes/services/victoria-metrics/freshness.md.hbs b/stackpacks/suse-observability/includes/services/victoria-metrics/freshness.md.hbs
index c13d8e4..3db970d 100644
--- a/stackpacks/suse-observability/includes/services/victoria-metrics/freshness.md.hbs
+++ b/stackpacks/suse-observability/includes/services/victoria-metrics/freshness.md.hbs
@@ -1,10 +1,10 @@
-The newest metric sample is older than the freshness objective, so dashboards and monitors are evaluating stale data.
+Metrics are taking longer than the freshness objective to become queryable after they are scraped, so dashboards and monitors are evaluating late data.
 
-Note this measures the age of arriving traffic, not end-to-end ingest latency. Check in order:
+The value is the smallest sample age seen over the last minute, which removes the normal rise between scrapes and leaves the delay through the pipeline. Check in order:
 
-- is anything still being written? `stackstate_vm_rows_inserted_total` should be rising
 - is vmagent holding data back? see the `vmagent - Write queue` panel
 - is the collector queue backing up? see the metrics export queue occupancy panel
 - is the receiver rejecting? see `Receiver - Memory limiter saturation`
+- is VictoriaMetrics slow to persist? see `VictoriaMetrics - Pending rows` and `Insert concurrency saturated`
 
-A jump here with healthy queues usually means scraping stopped rather than that the path is slow.
+If scraping has stopped entirely this monitor fires only after about 90 seconds, and it goes quiet once the series expire. `Receiver - No data received` covers a full stop.
diff --git a/stackpacks/suse-observability/settings/services/victoria-metrics/monitors.sty b/stackpacks/suse-observability/settings/services/victoria-metrics/monitors.sty
index e7f615c..c7b6d5b 100644
--- a/stackpacks/suse-observability/settings/services/victoria-metrics/monitors.sty
+++ b/stackpacks/suse-observability/settings/services/victoria-metrics/monitors.sty
@@ -267,8 +267,8 @@ nodes:
     arguments:
       metric:
         query: |-
-          sum(avg_over_time(stackstate_vm_concurrent_insert_current[1m])) by (cluster_name, namespace, pod_name)
-          / sum(stackstate_vm_concurrent_insert_capacity) by (cluster_name, namespace, pod_name)
+          sum(avg_over_time(stackstate_vm_concurrent_insert_current{kube_app_name=~"victoria-metrics-.*"}[1m])) by (cluster_name, namespace, pod_name)
+          / sum(stackstate_vm_concurrent_insert_capacity{kube_app_name=~"victoria-metrics-.*"}) by (cluster_name, namespace, pod_name)
         unit: "percentunit"
         aliasTemplate: "Insert concurrency in use"
       comparator: GTE
@@ -291,8 +291,8 @@ nodes:
     arguments:
       metric:
         query: |-
-          sum(avg_over_time(stackstate_vm_concurrent_select_current[1m])) by (cluster_name, namespace, pod_name)
-          / sum(stackstate_vm_concurrent_select_capacity) by (cluster_name, namespace, pod_name)
+          sum(avg_over_time(stackstate_vm_concurrent_select_current{kube_app_name=~"victoria-metrics-.*"}[1m])) by (cluster_name, namespace, pod_name)
+          / sum(stackstate_vm_concurrent_select_capacity{kube_app_name=~"victoria-metrics-.*"}) by (cluster_name, namespace, pod_name)
         unit: "percentunit"
         aliasTemplate: "Select concurrency in use"
       comparator: GTE
@@ -306,7 +306,7 @@ nodes:
 
   - _type: "Monitor"
     name: "VictoriaMetrics - Metrics are not fresh"
-    description: "Monitor that triggers when the newest metric sample is older than the freshness objective"
+    description: "Monitor that triggers when metrics take longer than the freshness objective to become queryable after they are scraped"
     tags:
       - victoria-metrics
       - suse-observability
@@ -315,9 +315,11 @@ nodes:
     arguments:
       metric:
         query: |-
-          time() - max(timestamp(stackstate_vm_rows_inserted_total)) by (cluster_name, namespace, pod_name)
+          max by (cluster_name, namespace, pod_name) (
+            min_over_time((time() - timestamp(stackstate_vm_rows_inserted_total{type="promremotewrite"}))[1m:5s])
+          )
         unit: "s"
-        aliasTemplate: "Age of the newest sample"
+        aliasTemplate: "Scrape to queryable delay"
       comparator: GT
       threshold: 30
       failureState: "DEVIATING"
diff --git a/stackpacks/suse-observability/stackpack.yaml b/stackpacks/suse-observability/stackpack.yaml
index 32d97de..ac929b9 100644
--- a/stackpacks/suse-observability/stackpack.yaml
+++ b/stackpacks/suse-observability/stackpack.yaml
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 name: suse-observability
-version: "0.0.9"
+version: "0.0.10"
 schemaVersion: "2.0"
 displayName: "SUSE Observability"
 categories: [ "SUSE Observability" ]