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For workloads whose telemetry you never want ingested, you can opt them out directly with pod annotations, with no filter rules needed. The Metoro exporter checks the annotations of the pod that produced each log line or trace span, and drops matching records before they leave the cluster, the same enforcement point as log filters and trace filters. Annotations are the right tool when the decision belongs to the workload itself (“this pod’s logs should never be collected”) and can ship alongside it in its own manifests. For content-based rules, environment-scoped rules, or rules maintained by a central team, use the UI filters or CRD Managed Ingestion Rules instead.

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Supported annotations

Values are case-insensitive and whitespace is trimmed. "false" explicitly disables the exclusion; any other value is ignored and logged as a warning by the exporter. Set the annotations on the pod template of the owning workload so every pod carries them:

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Trace direction

Metoro’s eBPF traces record both sides of a connection, and metoro.io/exclude-traces lets a pod opt out of either role independently:
  • "server" drops spans for requests received by the pod.
  • "client" drops spans for requests made by the pod.
  • "true" drops both.
Each span is evaluated individually: a span is dropped when the server-side pod excludes server traces or the client-side pod excludes client traces. Other spans of the same trace are exported normally.

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How it works

  • The exporter watches pods in the cluster and evaluates annotations locally: no round trip to Metoro, and annotation changes take effect as soon as the Kubernetes API reflects them.
  • Telemetry arriving shortly after a pod is deleted is still filtered: the exporter remembers a deleted pod’s annotations for a few minutes.
  • Drops are observable via the exporter’s metoro.exporter.annotation_dropped_records metric, broken down by signal and direction.
Annotation-based exclusion is enabled by default. It can be disabled by setting METORO_HONOR_WORKLOAD_TELEMETRY_ANNOTATIONS=false on the metoro-exporter deployment, after which the annotations are ignored cluster-wide.

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Fluent Bit compatibility

If you are migrating from a Fluent Bit-based logging pipeline, the exporter can also honor the fluentbit.io/exclude annotation ("true" drops the pod’s logs, same semantics as metoro.io/exclude-logs). This is off by default; enable it by setting METORO_HONOR_FLUENTBIT_ANNOTATIONS=true on the metoro-exporter deployment.