Currently, the metrics exposed by topic operator are not collected in the same way as metrics of CO and UO. When KT is changed in k8s or in Kafka and the config is wrong, TO will not count it as failed reconciliation even if the log of UO says different things.

Here is an example of exposed metrics. Kafka cluster had 4 topics and one of them was misconfigured 3 times:

strimzi_reconciliations_total\{kind="KafkaTopic",} 16.0 
strimzi_reconciliations_failed_total\{kind="KafkaTopic",} 0.0 
strimzi_reconciliations_successful_total\{kind="KafkaTopic",} 19.0
strimzi_reconciliations_periodical_total\{kind="KafkaTopic",} 5.0

 
According tbentley-1 the metrics collection in bidirectional way was tricky so that was probably the reason why it is handled as it is.

We agreed with tbentley-1 that we will open Jira for that and we will try to fix it in UTO implementation - https://github.com/strimzi/proposals/pull/76