Note that the controller-runtime already comes with a Prometheus-compatible metrics endpoint, but it is not exposed in the deployment manifest of the operator.

As Platform engineer you want to keep track on the deployment process on the various environment.
it would be clearly helpful to generate observability data on the deployments either by pushing a traces or an event.
Metrics are great but you are loosing details especialy if we are thinking of doing analytics.

Traces are great , but i would be sampled ..so for analytics perspective it would make sense to push OpenTelemetry events to an Opentelemetry Endpoint .
https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/logs/event-api/

With an event the end-user could imagine to extract the inventory of components , packages per cluster, team.... if we keep track on the versions of the packages. the analytics would be even go deeper.

Related issue: kubernetes-sigs/controller-runtime#305

Doesn't look like the controller-runtime is going to provide out of the box support for this, at least not anytime soon.

If anybody has experience implementing OTel please reach out, we'd love to get some more input on this.