The Pod Prometheus Never Saw: Kubernetes' Sampling Blind Spot

The Fix That Doesn’t Fix It Reducing your Prometheus scrape interval from 15 seconds to 5 seconds does not fix the sampling blind spot. It moves it. Any pod whose entire lifetime falls within one 5-second scrape gap is still structurally invisible — not because of misconfiguration, not because of missing rules, but because poll-based collection has an irreducible sampling gap that no interval setting eliminates.