EnvoyIstioPrometheus

Telemetry collection consumes excessive CPU per request

warning
performanceUpdated Feb 24, 2026(via Exa)
How to detect:

Telemetry collection is one of the most CPU-intensive sidecar operations. Every request generates metrics with multiple dimensions, access logs, and potentially traces. High metric cardinality and continuous access logging/span reporting drive significant per-request CPU cost.

Recommended action:

Use Telemetry resource to reduce metric cardinality by removing unnecessary tags (source_canonical_revision, destination_canonical_revision, request_protocol) via tagOverrides with REMOVE operation. Disable access logging with accessLogging.disabled: true and span reporting with tracing.disableSpanReporting: true for workloads that don't require them.