[rustyminnow]

You don't NEED an operator, but there are benefits.

If all of your pods have the same scrape settings, there's not much benefit to the operator. But if each pod or set of pods needs custom scrape settings - say different scrape intervals or custom tag re-writes, the operator will let you define each set of scrape configs separately as kubernetes resources. You can store the definitions alongside the resources they scrape instead of having a single large complex config in your prometheus deployement. This would be especially beneficial if you have multiple projects owned by multiple teams, all scraped by the same Prometheus.

Granted I also don't use the operator, but I've looked into it. With complex enough deployments it would simplify things.