The migration from SMCP managed prometheus to a self managed prometheus needs to be documented and tested.

Users should be able to create a self managed prometheus, turn off the SMCP prometheus addon, and still have metrics being reported by the mesh proxies.

One potential issue today is that disabling the prometheus addon on the SMCP also disables the proxies from exporting metrics altogether.

A workaround is to create a Telemetry object to override the SMCP settings:
apiVersion: telemetry.istio.io/v1alpha1
kind: Telemetry
metadata:
name: mesh-default
namespace: istio-system
spec:
metrics:

• overrides:
• disabled: false
  providers:
• name: prometheus