fix: aggregate ephemeral workload names to prevent series cardinality explosion#241
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… explosion Bare pods and standalone Jobs (e.g. Airflow KubernetesExecutor task pods) each get a unique workload name in TCP metrics, causing O(pods × destinations) series growth. For one customer this produced 693k series / 11GB RSS from 2,608 unique Airflow task pod names. Resolve a stable workload name from standard labels (app.kubernetes.io/name, app, app.kubernetes.io/component, component) for kind=pod and kind=Job. Falls back to <namespace>-ephemeral when no label matches. Controlled by --aggregate-ephemeral-workloads / AGGREGATE_EPHEMERAL_WORKLOADS (default: true). Pods owned by Deployments, StatefulSets, DaemonSets, or CronJobs are unaffected.
RamanKharchee
approved these changes
Apr 13, 2026
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This pull request implements aggregation for ephemeral workloads, specifically bare pods and standalone Jobs, to reduce metric cardinality. It introduces the AggregateEphemeralWorkloads flag and logic to resolve stable workload names using standard Kubernetes labels, falling back to a namespace-specific ephemeral name when labels are missing. The implementation includes corresponding unit tests. A review comment identifies an inconsistency in string casing for workload type checks that could lead to fragility.
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Summary
src_workload_namein TCP metrics, causing O(pods × destinations) series growth. For one customer this produced 693k series / 11GB RSS from 2,608 unique Airflow task pod names.app.kubernetes.io/name,app,app.kubernetes.io/component,component) forkind=podandkind=Job. Falls back to<namespace>-ephemeralwhen no label matches.--aggregate-ephemeral-workloads/AGGREGATE_EPHEMERAL_WORKLOADS(default:true). Pods owned by Deployments, StatefulSets, DaemonSets, or CronJobs are unaffected.Test plan
TestResolveEphemeralWorkloadName)TestEphemeralWorkloadAggregation)gofmtandgo vetclean