1. What is the nature and description of the request (What is affecting as of now? What usecase/results will get if the request is implemented)?

The nature of the request is getting back functionality that is natively enabled on the open source prometheus operator the openshift one is based on. There's no reason to remove/disable these features from open source products you are rebranding. We need to configure the prometheus operator to do remote reads from another backend (Cortex) which handles our longer-term storage. Currently by disabling this feature we're forced to consider moving to the vanilla prometheus-operator to get back the existing functionality.

1. Why does the customer need this? (List the business requirements here)

The business needs this to read prometheus metrics from other backends with variable retention levels.

[0] REF: https://github.com/openshift/cluster-monitoring-operator/pull/1334

The customer commented on the pull request[0] with requirements and Phillip redirected them to open an RFE so it's indeed.

If needed more info please update.
Thanks