Ability to disable watching for OpenTelemetryCollector CRDs

[atoulme]

Component(s)

auto-instrumentation

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

The manager currently registers to watch for opentelemetrycollector CRDs and fails if those are not defined or if its permissions are lacking.

Describe the solution you'd like

This watcher should be optional.

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

No response

[jaronoff97]

@atoulme IIRC this was a design choice. If the operator cannot watch for the collector CRDs, it wouldn't be able to do it's purpose? Can you explain more about the reasoning behind this request?

[atoulme]

My purpose is to use the operator only to instrument applications, and I run my collector deployment in a different manner.

[jaronoff97]

i understand that, but despite not running your collectors this way you can install the CRDs and do nothing with them. For optional CRDs that are not necessarily part of the project we can enable and disable some amount of this, but I'm not sure we would want to do this for the core collector functionality.

[atoulme]

Why is that?

[atoulme]

Here is an example showing how to execute on this approach, with a much smaller footprint:
https://github.com/otel-warez/whitegloves-operator