Feature Request: Allow disabling metrics and the otel-agent/otel-collector

[Shuanglu]

WHAT

I noticed that in the manifest there are some components like namespace 'config-management-monitoring'. It looks like they are only used for metrics collection. If I only want the basic feature of the config-sync like reconciling namespace/rolebinding, is it ok to remove them?

• namespaces/config-management-monitoring
• namespaces/config-management-system/configMap/otel-agent
• namespaces/resource-group-system/configMap/resource-group-otel-agent

[mikebz]

I don't think we test that scenario (there is enough permutations we are doing), but it could be that it's not needed @tiffanny29631 can chime in here.

[karlkfi]

The otel-agent sidecar is always installed in the config sync deployments. So if the otel-collector is not present on the cluster, those sidecars will error. And if you manually remove the sidecars, then the main app binaries would probably error and crash or log errors endlessly.

If this is a scenario you want to see, we could consider it a feature request though. FWIW, we have been considering making the metric export more easily configurable. It's possible we conceivably add an option to disable metrics completely, but it's not really something we would recommend doing in production.

Do you have a specific use case where you want to disable the metrics?

[Shuanglu]

The otel-agent sidecar is always installed in the config sync deployments. So if the otel-collector is not present on the cluster, those sidecars will error. And if you manually remove the sidecars, then the main app binaries would probably error and crash or log errors endlessly.

If this is a scenario you want to see, we could consider it a feature request though. FWIW, we have been considering making the metric export more easily configurable. It's possible we conceivably add an option to disable metrics completely, but it's not really something we would recommend doing in production.

Do you have a specific use case where you want to disable the metrics?

Thanks. It's just that we don't care much about the metrics itself. At least for now, the config-sync itself runs well and we don't find it's necessary for us to monitor the metrics of it. We only want it to run and sync the resources in the repo to our GKE.