Beyond Software Estimates: Measured Per-Pod... - Jedrzej Wasiukiewicz & Markus Lehtonen, Intel

Jedrzej Wasiukiewicz and Markus Lehtonen present an open-source path to measuring per-pod energy consumption in Kubernetes using Linux resctrl and OpenTelemetry.

Don't miss out! Join us at our next KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Salt Lake City, United States (Nov 9–12, 2026). Connect with our current graduated, incubating, and sandbox projects as the community gathers to further the education and advancement of cloud native computing. Learn more at kubecon.io Beyond Software Estimates: Measured Per-Pod Energy Telemetry for Kubernetes with OpenTelemetry - Jedrzej Wasiukiewicz & Markus Lehtonen, Intel How much energy is this pod actually consuming? Most Kubernetes energy metrics are modeled from CPU utilization because hardware energy counters cannot be attributed to a single workload. This case study presents a fully open-source path to measured per-pod energy, closing a critical observability gap on the path to making agentic AI more energy-efficient. The Linux 7.0 resctrl filesystem now exposes real energy telemetry, and this session shows how to attribute it to individual Kubernetes workloads — the missing input for energy-aware scheduling, per-tenant billing, and workload-level efficiency tuning in AI-focused data centers. The key is binding each pod to a monitoring group through NRI container-lifecycle hooks, which captures a workload's processes reliably where userspace polling daemons miss short-lived and forking threads. Attendees will follow the complete path from a silicon counter to a live Grafana panel, see how energy monitoring drops into an existing cluster without changing how workloads are scheduled or resourced, and learn how to deploy it themselves with a Helm chart.