kubectl takes ten seconds, operator leader elections flap, and etcd fsync latency is the only red metric. What now?

One disk metric explaining a whole cluster's weirdness is the point of this question. Restarting etcd first turns a slow cluster into a down one, because a restarted member has to catch up before it can vote.

Grounded in researched DevOps, SRE and platform engineering interview loops, written to a senior-engineer editorial bar, and never padded to hit a word count.