dcgm-exporter: enable ServiceMonitor by default and skip gracefully when Prometheus CRD is absent

[VincentG1234]

Problem

The DCGM Exporter ServiceMonitor has been opt-in (enabled: false) since the feature was introduced in 2022. Every user who wants GPU metrics scraped by Prometheus must remember to set serviceMonitor.enabled: true — a silent misconfiguration that causes hours of debugging (#305 #363) .

On top of that, when enabled: true is set and the Prometheus ServiceMonitor CRD is absent, the operator returns NotReady and blocks the entire reconcile loop (re-queuing every 5 seconds). This was documented in release 23.3 with added logging, but the underlying blocking behavior was never fixed. As a result, missing Prometheus CRDs prevent GFD pods from starting.

Solution

Two minimal changes:

1. Set serviceMonitor.enabled: true by default in values.yaml.
2. Fix the blocking behavior: when the Prometheus ServiceMonitor CRD is absent, the operator now returns Ready and skips gracefully instead of blocking the reconcile loop. This aligns state-dcgm-exporter with the existing behavior of state-operator-metrics, which already handled this case correctly.

An explicit enabled: false continues to disable and remove the resource.

Scenario	Before	After
enabled: true + CRD absent	NotReady (blocks reconcile loop, GFD stalls)	Ready (silent skip)
enabled: true + CRD present	created	created (unchanged)
enabled: false explicit	Disabled	Disabled (unchanged)

Changes

• deployments/gpu-operator/values.yaml — serviceMonitor.enabled: false → enabled: true.
• controllers/object_controls.go — ServiceMonitor(): CRD-absent path returns Ready instead of NotReady, consistent with state-operator-metrics.
• api/nvidia/v1/clusterpolicy_types.go — DCGMExporterServiceMonitorConfig.IsEnabled(): nil defaults to true, consistent with the rest of the codebase.

Testing

go test ./controllers/... -run TestServiceMonitor -v

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