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Turn signals on and off from the UI — no redeploy, no cluster access

avuru obs team
Maintainers

Deciding what Avuru Obs collects used to mean editing values.yaml, running helm upgrade, and holding the cluster permissions to do it — so in practice collection stayed whatever it was on install day. Now an admin changes it from the app, and the sensor follows within seconds.

  • Collection is a setting, not a deployment. Settings → Collection switches eBPF traces, logs, infrastructure metrics, profiling and energy collection on or off, and edits the excluded-namespace list. Turn profiling off at 2 a.m. because it is costing you more than it is telling you, and turn it back on in the morning — without touching the chart.

  • What the screen shows is what the sensor is doing. It reports the effective configuration: your chart values with the overlay applied, not one or the other. "Reset to defaults" clears the overlay and reconciles the cluster back to exactly what the chart declares — a reset that only forgot the setting would leave the two quietly disagreeing.

  • Off by default, and narrow when you turn it on. The feature is gated on collection.runtimeControl.enabled. Opting in grants the hub permission to update its own four named sensor ConfigMaps and patch its own named sensor DaemonSet, in its own namespace — nothing cluster-wide, nothing belonging to anyone else. The hub rolls the sensor using its own annotation and leaves the chart's ownership untouched, so a later helm upgrade behaves exactly as before. With the flag off, nothing changes and no extra permission is granted.

  • Verified against a real cluster, not a mock. The Helm smoke gate now installs with the feature on, writes a setting through the API, and asserts it reaches the sensor's configuration and rolls the DaemonSet — then resets and asserts the cluster comes back. A change that is saved but never reaches the sensor is the failure that matters here, and the gate is built to catch exactly that.

Configuration lives in the chart under collection.runtimeControl. See Kubernetes setup for the flag, and modules for how each signal is gated.