Changing Prometheus job label in scraper for cAdvisor breaks Grafana dashboards

Unfortunately, I don't have access to Azure AKS, so I've reproduced this issue on my GKE cluster. Below I'll provide some explanations that may help to resolve your problem.

First you can try to execute this node_namespace_pod_container:container_cpu_usage_seconds_total:sum_irate rule to see if it returns any result:

If it doesn't return any records, please read the following paragraphs.

Creating a scrape configuration for cAdvisor

Rather than creating a completely new scrape configuration for cadvisor, I would suggest using one that is generated by default when kubelet.serviceMonitor.cAdvisor: true, but with a few modifications such as changing the label to job=kubernetes-cadvisor.

In my example, the 'kubernetes-cadvisor' scrape configuration looks like this:

NOTE: I added this config under the additionalScrapeConfigs in the values.yaml file (the rest of the values.yaml file may be like yours).

- job_name: 'kubernetes-cadvisor'
  honor_labels: true
  honor_timestamps: true
  scrape_interval: 30s
  scrape_timeout: 10s
  metrics_path: /metrics/cadvisor
  scheme: https
  authorization:
    type: Bearer
    credentials_file: /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/token
  tls_config:
    ca_file: /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/ca.crt
    insecure_skip_verify: true
  follow_redirects: true
  relabel_configs:
  - source_labels: [job]
    separator: ;
    regex: (.*)
    target_label: __tmp_prometheus_job_name
    replacement: $1
    action: replace
  - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_service_label_app_kubernetes_io_name]
    separator: ;
    regex: kubelet
    replacement: $1
    action: keep
  - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_service_label_k8s_app]
    separator: ;
    regex: kubelet
    replacement: $1
    action: keep
  - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_endpoint_port_name]
    separator: ;
    regex: https-metrics
    replacement: $1
    action: keep
  - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_endpoint_address_target_kind, __meta_kubernetes_endpoint_address_target_name]
    separator: ;
    regex: Node;(.*)
    target_label: node
    replacement: ${1}
    action: replace
  - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_endpoint_address_target_kind, __meta_kubernetes_endpoint_address_target_name]
    separator: ;
    regex: Pod;(.*)
    target_label: pod
    replacement: ${1}
    action: replace
  - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_namespace]
    separator: ;
    regex: (.*)
    target_label: namespace
    replacement: $1
    action: replace
  - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_service_name]
    separator: ;
    regex: (.*)
    target_label: service
    replacement: $1
    action: replace
  - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_pod_name]
    separator: ;
    regex: (.*)
    target_label: pod
    replacement: $1
    action: replace
  - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_pod_container_name]
    separator: ;
    regex: (.*)
    target_label: container
    replacement: $1
    action: replace
  - separator: ;
    regex: (.*)
    target_label: endpoint
    replacement: https-metrics
    action: replace
  - source_labels: [__metrics_path__]
    separator: ;
    regex: (.*)
    target_label: metrics_path
    replacement: $1
    action: replace
  - source_labels: [__address__]
    separator: ;
    regex: (.*)
    modulus: 1
    target_label: __tmp_hash
    replacement: $1
    action: hashmod
  - source_labels: [__tmp_hash]
    separator: ;
    regex: "0"
    replacement: $1
    action: keep
  kubernetes_sd_configs:
  - role: endpoints
    kubeconfig_file: ""
    follow_redirects: true
    namespaces:
      names:
      - kube-system

Modifying Prometheus Rules

By default, Prometheus rules fetching data from cAdvisor use job="kubelet" in their PromQL expressions:

After changing job=kubelet to job=kubernetes-cadvisor, we also need to modify this label in the Prometheus rules:
NOTE: We just need to modify the rules that have metrics_path="/metrics/cadvisor (these are rules that retrieve data from cAdvisor).

$ kubectl get prometheusrules prom-1-kube-prometheus-sta-k8s.rules -o yaml
...
  - name: k8s.rules
    rules:
    - expr: |-
        sum by (cluster, namespace, pod, container) (
          irate(container_cpu_usage_seconds_total{job="kubernetes-cadvisor", metrics_path="/metrics/cadvisor", image!=""}[5m])
        ) * on (cluster, namespace, pod) group_left(node) topk by (cluster, namespace, pod) (
          1, max by(cluster, namespace, pod, node) (kube_pod_info{node!=""})
        )
      record: node_namespace_pod_container:container_cpu_usage_seconds_total:sum_irate
...
here we have a few more rules to modify...

After modifying Prometheus rules and waiting some time, we can see if it works as expected. We can try to execute node_namespace_pod_container:container_cpu_usage_seconds_total:sum_irate as in the beginning.

Additionally, let's check out our Grafana to make sure it has started displaying our dashboards correctly: