The performance data and traces that you’re collecting with Datadog can contain sensitive information that you want to filter out, obfuscate, scrub, filter, modify, or just not collect. Additionally, it may contain synthetic traffic that might cause your error counts to be inaccurate or Datadog to not accurately indicate the health of your services.
The Datadog Agent and some tracing libraries have options available to address these situations and modify or discard spans, and various options are described below. These docs cover several common methods for configuring Tracer and Agent to achieve these security requirements.
If your fine-tuning needs aren’t covered and you need assistance, reach out to the Datadog support team.
Datadog enforces several filtering mechanisms on spans as a baseline, to provide sound defaults for basic security and generalize resource names to facilitate grouping during analysis. In particular:
Environment variables are not collected by the Agent
SQL variables are obfuscated, even when not using prepared statements: For example, the following sql.query attribute: SELECT data FROM table WHERE key=123 LIMIT 10 has its variables obfuscated, to become the following Resource name: SELECT data FROM table WHERE key = ? LIMIT ?
Numbers in Resource names (for example, request URLs) are obfuscated For example, the following elasticsearch attribute:
Elasticsearch : {
method : GET,
url : /user.0123456789/friends/_count
}
has its number in the URL obfuscated, to become the following Resource name: GET /user.?/friends/_count
Agent trace obfuscation is disabled by default. Enable it in your datadog.yaml configuration file to obfuscate all information attached to your traces.
This option works with the following services:
mongodbelasticsearchredismemcachedhttpremove_stack_tracesNote: You can use automatic scrubbing for multiple types of services at the same time. Configure each in the obfuscation section of your datadog.yaml file.
Applies to spans of type mongodb, more specifically: to the mongodb.query span tags.
apm_config:
enabled: true
## (...)
obfuscation:
# MongoDB obfuscation rules. Applies to spans of type "mongodb".
# More specifically, to the "mongodb.query" tag.
mongodb:
enabled: true
# Values for the keys listed here will not be obfuscated.
keep_values:
- document_id
- template_id
keep_values - defines a set of keys to exclude from Agent trace obfuscation.Applies to spans of type elasticsearch, more specifically, to the elasticsearch.body span tags:
apm_config:
enabled: true
## (...)
obfuscation:
# ElasticSearch obfuscation rules. Applies to spans of type "elasticsearch".
# More specifically, to the "elasticsearch.body" tag.
elasticsearch:
enabled: true
# Values for the keys listed here will not be obfuscated.
keep_values:
- client_id
- product_id
Applies to spans of type redis, more specifically, to the redis.raw_command span tags:
apm_config:
enabled: true
## (...)
obfuscation:
redis:
enabled: true
Applies to spans of type memcached, more specifically, to the memcached.command span tags:
apm_config:
enabled: true
## (...)
obfuscation:
memcached:
enabled: true
HTTP obfuscation rules for http.url metadata in spans of type http:
apm_config:
enabled: true
## (...)
obfuscation:
http:
remove_query_string: true
remove_paths_with_digits: true
remove_query_string: If true, obfuscates query strings in URLs.remove_paths_with_digits: If true, path segments in URLs containing digits are replaced by “?”.Set the remove_stack_traces parameter to true, to remove stack traces and replace them with ?.
apm_config:
enabled: true
## (...)
obfuscation:
remove_stack_traces: true
To scrub sensitive data from your span’s tags, use the replace_tags setting in your datadog.yaml configuration file or the DD_APM_REPLACE_TAGS environment variable. The value of the setting or environment variable is a list of one or more groups of parameters that specify how to replace sensitive data in your tags. These parameters are:
name: The key of the tag to replace. To match all tags, use *. To match the resource, use resource.name.pattern: The regexp pattern to match against.repl: The replacement string.For example:
apm_config:
replace_tags:
# Replace all characters starting at the `token/` string in the tag "http.url" with "?":
- name: "http.url"
pattern: "token/(.*)"
repl: "?"
# Replace all the occurrences of "foo" in any tag with "bar":
- name: "*"
pattern: "foo"
repl: "bar"
# Remove all "error.stack" tag's value.
- name: "error.stack"
pattern: "(?s).*"
DD_APM_REPLACE_TAGS=[
{
"name": "http.url",
"pattern": "token/(.*)",
"repl": "?"
},
{
"name": "*",
"pattern": "foo",
"repl": "bar"
},
{
"name": "error.stack",
"pattern": "(?s).*"
}
]
Note: Put this environment variable in the trace-agent container if you are using the recommended daemonset configuration.
- name: DD_APM_REPLACE_TAGS
value: '[
{
"name": "http.url",
"pattern": "token/(.*)",
"repl": "?"
},
{
"name": "*",
"pattern": "foo",
"repl": "bar"
},
{
"name": "error.stack",
"pattern": "(?s).*"
}
]'
- DD_APM_REPLACE_TAGS=[{"name":"http.url","pattern":"token/(.*)","repl":"?"},{"name":"*","pattern":"foo","repl":"bar"},{"name":"error.stack","pattern":"(?s).*"}]
For an in depth overview of the options to avoid tracing specific resources, see Ignoring Unwanted Resources.
If your services include simulated traffic such as health checks, you may want to exclude these traces from being collected so the metrics for your services match production traffic.
The Agent can be configured to exclude a specific resource from traces sent by the Agent to Datadog. To prevent the submission of specific resources, use the ignore_resources setting in the datadog.yaml file . Then create a list of one or more regular expressions, specifying which resources the Agent will filter out based on their resource name.
If you are running in a containerized environment, set DD_APM_IGNORE_RESOURCES on the container with the Datadog Agent instead. See the Docker APM Agent environment variables for details.
## @param ignore_resources - list of strings - optional
## A list of regular expressions can be provided to exclude certain traces based on their resource name.
## All entries must be surrounded by double quotes and separated by commas.
# ignore_resources: ["(GET|POST) /healthcheck","API::NotesController#index"]
If you require tailored instrumentation for a specific application, consider using the Agent-side tracing API to select individual spans to include in traces. See the API documentation for additional information.
While this page deals with modifying data once it has reached the Datadog Agent, some tracing libraries are extensible. You can write a custom post-processor to intercept spans and adjust or discard them accordingly (for example, based on a regular expression match). View the Custom Instrumentation documentation for your language for more information.