Out of all the enterprise observability tools we have discussed, Prometheus and Thanos are the only ones natively integrated, pre-installed, and fully managed out-of-the-box by the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) installer.

They form the core engine of the OCP Cluster Monitoring Operator (CMO).

The other tools (Flux, StackRox/ACS, and Jaeger) are available as official, Red Hat-certified operators, but they require a manual post-installation setup.

Here is the exact breakdown of how these tools fit into native OpenShift:

1. Natively Integrated (Pre-installed out-of-the-box)

The moment an OpenShift cluster finishes installing, a complete, enterprise-grade metrics ecosystem is already up and running in the openshift-monitoring namespace.

• Prometheus: OCP runs dual-engine Prometheus pipelines natively. One dedicated instance (prometheus-k8s) continuously watches core cluster health (node CPU, memory, API control plane latency). A second, separate instance can be easily flipped on via a simple config map toggle (User Workload Monitoring) to let developers safely scrape application-level metrics using the exact same underlying architecture.
• Thanos: Thanos is a standard component of the default OCP monitoring stack. It acts as the underlying Thanos Querier, stitching together real-time platform metrics and routing them directly into your native OpenShift Web Console dashboards. It can easily be connected to an enterprise cloud storage bucket (like S3) for infinite historical log retention.
• Alertmanager: Accompanying Prometheus, it handles standard cluster alerting out-of-the-box, giving you the ability to forward platform warnings directly to webhook targets like PagerDuty or Slack.

2. Red Hat Certified Operators (One-Click Day-2 Install)

These tools are not active on a fresh OCP install, but they are fully integrated into the native OpenShift OperatorHub. Red Hat maintains, builds, and supports them as first-class citizens. You can install them with a single click from the UI console or a single GitOps file.

OpenShift GitOps (Powered by ArgoCD & Flux)

• The Default: Red Hat standardizes ArgoCD as its flagship engine under the official Red Hat OpenShift GitOps operator package.
• Flux Support: While ArgoCD gets the native visual UI integration inside OCP, Red Hat also builds and fully supports the Flux Operator for teams that prefer a decentralized, modular GitOps workflow.

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security (ACS / StackRox)

• Available via the Advanced Cluster Security Operator. Once clicked, it integrates directly with OpenShift’s native Security Context Constraints (SCCs) and ingress routes to deploy its Central and Sensor engines.

Red Hat OpenShift distributed tracing (Jaeger & OpenTelemetry)

• Available via the Red Hat OpenShift distributed tracing platform operator. This deploys the Jaeger storage and visualization UI alongside the OpenTelemetry Collector to manage deep application traces seamlessly inside your namespaces.

Summary Cheat Sheet

Tool	Native OCP Status	Component Namespace	Managed By
Prometheus	Fully Native (Built-in)	openshift-monitoring	Cluster Monitoring Operator
Thanos	Fully Native (Built-in)	openshift-monitoring	Cluster Monitoring Operator
ArgoCD / Flux	Day-2 Operator	openshift-gitops / flux-system	OpenShift GitOps Operator
StackRox (ACS)	Day-2 Operator	stackrox	Advanced Cluster Security Operator
Jaeger (OTel)	Day-2 Operator	User-defined (e.g., tracing)	OpenShift Distributed Tracing Operator