> I manage these with helm. I might, one day, get around to using the Prometheus Operator thing, but it doesn't seem to do anything for me except add a layer of hassle.

One big advantage of the operator is that its custom resources are practically kind of standard by now. This means helm charts for a lot of software ship those and integrating that piece of software into your monitoring is a matter of setting a few flags to true. The go to solution for a k8s monitoring setup is https://github.com/prometheus-community/helm-charts/tree/mai...