Add a description to the ksm sharding example

Signed-off-by: Pete Wall <[email protected]>
grafana · Jan 9, 2025 · 07aac9e · 07aac9e
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diff --git a/...s/k8s-monitoring/docs/examples/scalability/sharded-kube-state-metrics/README.md b/...s/k8s-monitoring/docs/examples/scalability/sharded-kube-state-metrics/README.md
@@ -2,7 +2,34 @@
 (NOTE: Do not edit README.md directly. It is a generated file!)
 (      To make changes, please modify values.yaml or description.txt and run `make examples`)
 -->
-# Example: scalability/sharded-kube-state-metrics/values.yaml
+# Sharded kube-state-metrics
+
+This example demonstrates how to [shard kube-state-metrics](https://github.com/kubernetes/kube-state-metrics#scaling-kube-state-metrics)
+to improve scalability. This is useful when your Kubernetes cluster has a large number of objects and kube-state-metrics
+is struggling to keep up. The symptoms of this might be:
+
+* It takes longer than 60 seconds to scrape kube-state-metrics, which is longer than the scrape interval.
+* The sheer amount of metric data coming from kube-state-metrics is causing Alloy to spike its required resources.
+* kube-state-metrics itself might not be able to keep up with the number of objects in the cluster.
+
+By increasing the number of replicas and enabling [automatic sharding](https://github.com/kubernetes/kube-state-metrics#automated-sharding),
+kube-state-metrics will automatically distribute the resources on the cluster across the shards.
+
+## Changing replicas
+
+Whenever the number of replicas changes, there are two scenarios to consider. Your requirements will dictate which one
+is best for you.
+
+### RollingUpdate
+
+If the deployment strategy is set to `RollingUpdate`, when kube-state-metrics is updated it is possible for there to be
+two running instances for a short period. This means that there shouldn't be a gap in metrics, but could lead to
+duplicate metrics for a short period.
+
+### Recreate
+
+However, if the deployment strategy is set to `Recreate`, the old kube-state-metrics pod is terminated before the new
+one is started. This means that there will be a gap in metrics while the new pod is starting.
 
 ## Values
 

diff --git a/charts/k8s-monitoring/docs/examples/scalability/sharded-kube-state-metrics/description.txt b/charts/k8s-monitoring/docs/examples/scalability/sharded-kube-state-metrics/description.txt