Quantify the operational cost of collector reconfiguration

Quantify the operational cost and transient disruption caused by the Kubernetes rolling update required to apply each new OpenTelemetry Collector sampling configuration in RADAR.

Background

RADAR updates its sampling policy by modifying the OpenTelemetry Collector configuration. In the implementation, each policy update triggers a Kubernetes rolling update so that new collector pods can start with the revised configuration while old pods are terminated after the replacement pods become ready.

The evaluation measured resource consumption and trace-quality outcomes but did not measure the overhead or service disruption introduced by this repeated reconfiguration process. Quantifying that cost is necessary to assess RADAR's total operational overhead and production suitability.

References

Finally, each policy update triggers a Kubernetes rolling update of the collector (Section~\ref{prototype}), and this work does not quantify the operational cost or transient disruption of that reconfiguration step itself, which would be relevant for assessing RADAR's overhead in a production setting.

— Dynamic Sampling for Telemetry in Microservices: A Reinforcement Learning and Entropy-Based Approach  (2609.31292 - Alves et al., 25 Sep 2026) in Section “Threats to validity,” subsection of Section 6 (Conclusion)