Filter Logs

Filter logs from the OTLP, application, and Istio input to control which data your pipeline processes. You can define filters to include or exclude logs based on their source namespace, container, and other attributes.

Overview

Source	Granularity	Behavior without 'namespaces' Block	Collect from All Namespaces	Collect from Specific Namespaces
OTLP (default)	Namespace	includes system namespaces	This is the default, no action needed.	Use the include or exclude filter
Application	Namespace, Container*	excludes system namespaces	Set the system attribute to true	Use the include or exclude filter
Istio	Namespace, Workload (selector), Log content (filter.expression)	n/a	Apply the Istio Telemetry resource mesh-wide	Apply the Istio Telemetry resource to specific namespaces

* The application input provides an additional containers selector that behaves the same way as the namespaces selector.

Filter OTLP Logs by Namespaces

You can filter incoming OTLP logs by namespace. By default, all system namespaces are included. The include and exclude filters are mutually exclusive.

• To collect metrics from specific namespaces, use the include filter:

  spec:
    input:
      otlp:
        namespaces:
          include:
            - namespaceA
            - namespaceB

• To collect OTLP logs from all namespaces except specific ones, use the exclude filter:

  spec:
    input:
      otlp:
        namespaces:
          exclude:
            - namespaceA
            - namespaceB

Filter Application Logs by Namespace

You can control which namespaces to collect logs from using include, exclude, and system filters. The include and exclude filters are mutually exclusive.

• To collect logs from specific namespaces, use the include filter:

    ...
    input:
      application:
        namespaces:
          include:
            - namespaceA
            - namespaceB

• To collect logs from all namespaces except specific ones, use the exclude filter:

    ...
    input:
      application:
        namespaces:
          exclude:
            - namespaceC

Collect Application Logs from System Namespaces

By default, application logs from kube-system, istio-system, and kyma-system are excluded. To override this and collect logs from them, set the system attribute to true:

  ...
  input:
    application:
      enabled: true
        namespaces:
          system: true

Filter Application Logs by Container

You can also filter logs based on the container name with include and exclude filters. These filters apply in addition to any namespace filters.

The following pipeline collects input from all namespaces excluding kyma-system and only from the istio-proxy containers:

...
  input:
    application:
      enabled: true
      namespaces:
        exclude:
          - myNamespace
      containers:
        exclude:
          - myContainer
    otlp:
      ...

Select Istio Logs from a Specific Application

To limit logging to a single application within a namespace, configure label-based selection for this workload with a selector in the Istio Telemetry resource.

apiVersion: telemetry.istio.io/v1
kind: Telemetry
metadata:
  name: access-config
  namespace: $YOUR_NAMESPACE
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      service.istio.io/canonical-name: $YOUR_LABEL
  accessLogging:
    - providers:
      - name: kyma-logs

Filter Istio Logs by Content

To reduce noise and cost, filter your Istio access logs. This is especially useful for filtering out traffic that doesn't use an HTTP-based protocol, as those log entries often lack useful details.

Add a filter expression to the same accessLogging block that you used to enable the logs. The expression uses Envoy attributes to define which log entries to keep.

The following example enables mesh-wide logging but only keeps logs that have a defined request protocol, effectively filtering out most non-HTTP traffic.

apiVersion: telemetry.istio.io/v1
kind: Telemetry
metadata:
  name: mesh-default
  namespace: istio-system
spec:
  accessLogging:
    - filter:
        expression: 'has(request.protocol)'
      providers:
        - name: kyma-logs