Drop Filters let you automatically discard noisy or irrelevant log lines, metrics, or spans before they count toward your ingest quota. Logs, metrics, or spans that match an active drop filter are never stored in Observe, meaning that they:

• Can't be searched.

• Don't trigger alerts.

• Never appear in dashboards, reports, or any other views.

Your monthly bill is calculated from Remaining observations, not the discarded Source observations.

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Warning

You may filter out up to 50% of your average daily ingest volume (measured without Drop Filters enabled).

Requirements

To create a drop filter, you must satisfy one of the following conditions:

• Be an admin, or a member of a group with admin privileges.
• Hold at least Edit access on the dataset where you’re adding the filter.

Limitations

The following limitations are known at this time:

• Drop filters can be attached only to source Datasets or top‑level Datasets such as Kubernetes Explorer/OpenTelemetry logs, Tracing/Span Raw, or Metrics/OpenTelemetry.
• Drop filters do not apply to data ingested using filedrop or pollers, such as AWS data from the Add Data portal, filedrop‑based AWS integrations, or pollers for AWS and GCP.
• Each source or top-level Dataset can have up to 100 drop filters.

Create a drop filter

Perform the following steps to create a drop filter:

1. From the left navigation rail, select Data & integrations > Drop filters.
2. Click New drop filter.
3. Choose a target Dataset.
4. Define one or more filter expressions that identify the noisy or irrelevant log lines you want to discard.
5. Specify the drop rate, such as 100%, or 95%.
6. Click Save drop filter.

Allow 1–2 minutes for the filter to become active.

To create or manage drop filters programmatically via Terraform, use the observe_drop_filter resource in the Observe Terraform Provider documentation.

Delete a drop filter

To delete a drop filter, you must first disable it, then you can delete it:

1. From the left navigation rail, select Data & integrations > Drop filters.
2. Find the filter you want to delete, and slide the toggle in the Enabled column to the off position to disable the filter.
3. After the filter is disabled, hover on the filter, then click the trash can icon () to delete the filter.