Filter data to send

While Polar Signals strongly recommends sending all data infrastructure wide, there can be cases where it might make sense to selectively send data.

Note that filtering data as described here, only filters the sample data, it does not affect the automatic upload functionality of debuginfos. If automatic uploads are not desired, they can be turned off using the --debuginfo-upload-disable flag.

Configuration

The Polar Signals Agent supports Prometheus relabel_configs to select data to be sent or not. Specifically any label-set that ends up empty after relabeling will be dropped, and the keep or drop action are short-hands for that.

Let's take an example where only data from specific namespaces in Kubernetes are configured to be sent.

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: parca-agent-config
  namespace: polarsignals
data:
  parca-agent.yaml: |
    relabel_configs:
      - source_labels: [namespace]
        regex: '(team-a-.+|my-namespace)' # Regexes are already anchored, so they are automatically wrapped in `^regex$`.
        action: keep

This configuration would send data from any namespace that has the team-a- prefix or an exact match to my-namespace.

To make sure this config is loaded by the agent, ensure that there is a volume defined for it in the agent's DaemonSet.

      volumes:
        - configMap:
            name: parca-agent-config
          name: parca-agent-config

As well as a volume mount.

          volumeMounts:
            - mountPath: /etc/parca-agent
              name: parca-agent-config

When there is a configuration at /etc/parca-agent/parca-agent.yaml, it is automatically loaded, but if you want to specify it to be somewhere else, then configure it via the --config-file flag.

      - args:
        - --config-file=/etc/parca-agent/parca-agent.yaml

If you run into any difficulties, feel free to contact support.