The Datadog Agent has been extended to support extracting additional metrics from Kubernetes using the kube-state-metrics service. This is achieved through an HTTP API that supports content negotiation, allowing for plain text or binary format output. Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) are used for binary encoding and decoding, offering efficient data transfer. However, due to Python implementation limitations, a C++ extension is recommended for performance gains. Benchmarks show Protobuf outperforming plain text in terms of payload size but the pure Python version is slow. Despite this, implementing chained messages with Protobuf requires minimal code changes. The new `kubernetes_state` check released with Agent version 5.10 uses Protobuf for efficient data processing and decoding.