Explorer and exporter were scanning the full Parquet lake every 1–5s (~2000 files, 200MB+), driving ~2.2 CPU cores. Limit metrics to the last N flights, cache DuckDB views and the partition tree, slow live polls to 2s, and keep drones alive after seal to stop restart churn. Add node-exporter, scan-duration metrics, and a Swarm Platform Grafana dashboard for node CPU/memory and scan health.