kube-state-metrics doesn't specifically matter. Prometheus has built-in Kubernetes service discovery, and you can drop labels/annotations or not. Most people

kube-state-metrics doesn't specifically matter. Prometheus has built-in Kubernetes service discovery, and you can drop labels/annotations or not. Most people never see this because they take an opaque blob from a vendor (helm chart, prometheus-operator), etc. -- but it's there: https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/configuration/configuration/#kubernetes_sd_config https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/configuration/c... kube-state-metrics does its own service discovery and outputs prometheus metrics that it cares about, but any app could do that.