Currently, the Clowder otel-collector sidecar only supports secretKeyRef and configMapKeyRef for environment variable sources, but does not support fieldRef to access pod metadata (e.g., status.podIP, metadata.name, spec.nodeName).

Example:

sidecars:
  - name: otel-collector
    enabled: true
    envVars:
      - name: K8S_POD_IP
        valueFrom:
          fieldRef:           # ❌ Ignored/not converted
            fieldPath: status.podIP

Use Case

OpenTelemetry collector sidecars need access to pod metadata for:

• Pod IP for self-scraping metrics endpoints (targets: [${K8S_POD_IP}:8889])
• Pod/Node names for resource attribution in traces/metrics
• Namespace for multi-tenant observability
• UID for unique resource identification

Proposed change

https://github.com/RedHatInsights/clowder/pull/1294