It’s astonishing how much data is emitted by Kubernetes out of the box. A simple three-node Kubernetes cluster with Prometheus will ship around 40,000 active series by default!
Prometheus Operator, the standard installation path, installs additional components for monitoring Kubernetes, such as kube-state-metrics, node-exporter and cAdvisor. Using the default Prometheus Operator to monitor even a small 3-node Kubernetes cluster results in around 40,000 different metrics!
Back to our ephemeral pods, many practitioners use the pod name as a label within their metrics time series data.