The Service Mesh team would like to collect metrics about service mesh control plane usage that goes deeper than what we are able to obtain from the default operator and CRD metrics that are available today. In particular, tracking the size and versions (which is different from the operator version).

We're proposing a metric - Service Mesh Control Plane Namespace Count:

• A label "smcp_version", which indicates the version of the version of the service mesh control plane (e.g. 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, etc). 
• A label "topology", with two possible values: "multi-tenant" or "cluster-wide"
• Value: The number of namespaces in the mesh at any given time.

The total cardinality of this metric should be the number of SMCP versions(~4 at a given time) x 2 (topology), which is probably 8 at any given time, and at most 10.

We have this issue in our backlog for implementing the new metric: https://issues.redhat.com/browse/OSSM-2368. We would like to complete this issue for upcoming 2.4 release, thus we would like to implement this in the next 4 weeks.

As a first step, we're looking for feedback, guidance and ultimately approval on adding this new metric to telemetry from the monitoring team.