To help you curb unnecessary telemetry, we have introduced Spam Filters. With two clicks, you can define filtering rules, executed by the Dash0 ingestion pipeline, to drop logs, metric data points and spans before Dash0 charges you for it.
(You read it correctly: there is no extra charge for spam filter rules, and data that is dropped by them, does not count against your Dash0 bill.)
Any combination of filters you can specify in the Logging, Tracing or Metrics pages can be synthesized as Spam filters. You can also export those filters as OpenTelemetry Collector configurations using the filter processor and OTTL (which is pretty much how we implemented it in our ingestion pipeline), so that you can deploy the same filters in your infrastructure and be doubly sure.
The Spam filters are listed in your dataset configurations, and different datasets can specify different filters.
After you create a Spam filter, matching telemetry starts getting dropped in a few seconds, but you might get a few last “stragglers” in. Similarly, after you remove a Spam filter, it will take a few seconds for the change to take effect. Telemetry that has been dropped by a Spam filter is not recoverable by Dash0.
In a later update, we will add tracking for just how much data you dropped. (You know, for bragging rights and so.)
Oh, by the way, we added similar functionality to drop telemetry in the Dash0 operator.
Note about spans: Spam filters drop single spans, you might end up with incomplete traces (unlike what you do with client-side sampling).