Skip to main content
Before diving into configuration, it helps to understand how Edge thinks about telemetry processing.

​
Policies

A policy is an atomic rule that matches specific telemetry and applies an action. Each policy does one thing: identify telemetry that meets certain conditions, then decide what happens to it. You can think of a policy as a way to select a group of telemetry and apply an action to it. The policy syntax is based on the OpenTelemetry Semantic Convention and is being evaluated for donation to the OpenTelemetry project. For now, you can read Tero’s Policy Specification to learn more.
The policy specification is still in development and subject to change.
id: drop-debug-logs
name: Drop debug and trace logs
log:
  match:
    - log_field: severity_text
      regex: "^(DEBUG|TRACE)$"
  keep: none
This policy matches logs with DEBUG or TRACE severity and drops them. Nothing else.

​
Policy Properties

Every policy has these characteristics:
  • Atomic: One intent per policy. Match one pattern, apply a set of actions.
  • Self-contained: No dependencies between policies. Each stands alone.
  • Fail-open: If evaluation fails, telemetry passes through.
  • Idempotent: Safe to apply multiple times with identical results.

​
Why Atomic Policies?

Traditional pipelines are sequential. Telemetry flows through a chain of processors, each modifying the data. This creates problems:
  • Order matters: Changing one processor affects downstream processors
  • Hidden dependencies: Processors rely on fields set by earlier processors
  • Debugging nightmare: Tracing why telemetry changed requires understanding the entire chain
Edge policies execute in parallel. Each policy evaluates independently against the original telemetry. No policy depends on another policy’s output. This makes policies:
  • Easy to add, remove, or modify without side effects
  • Simple to understand in isolation
  • Safe to generate programmatically

​
Matchers

Matchers identify which telemetry a policy applies to. A policy can have multiple matchers—all must match for the policy to apply (AND logic). When creating a policy, it’s best to ensure the matchers are mutually exclusive to avoid unintended matches. 
match:
  - resource_attribute: service.name
    exact: checkout-api
  - log_field: severity_text
    exact: DEBUG
This matches only DEBUG logs from the checkout-api service.

​
Match Types

TypeDescriptionExample
exactExact string equalityexact: "error"
regexRE2 regular expressionregex: "^payment-"
existsField presence checkexists: true

​
Negation

Add negate: true to invert any match: 
match:
  - log_field: severity_text
    exact: DEBUG
    negate: true # Matches everything EXCEPT DEBUG

​
Actions

When a policy matches, it contributes to two stages: keep and transform.

​
Keep Stage

The keep action determines whether telemetry survives processing:
ValueEffect
keep: allKeep all matching telemetry (default)
keep: noneDrop all matching telemetry
keep: 50%Keep 50% (percentage sampling)
keep: 100/sKeep max 100 per second (rate limiting)
When multiple policies match the same telemetry, the most restrictive action wins:
  1. none (drop) beats everything
  2. Lower percentages beat higher percentages
  3. Rate limits are evaluated independently

​
Transform Stage

Transforms modify telemetry that survives the keep stage:
OperationEffect
removeDelete fields
redactMask field values
renameChange field names
addInsert new fields
Transforms execute in strict order: remove → redact → rename → add.

​
Execution Model

Edge processes telemetry in two fixed stages: 
Telemetry → Match (parallel) → Keep → Transform → Output
                ├─ Policy 1
                ├─ Policy 2
                └─ Policy N
  1. Match: All policies evaluate in parallel against the incoming telemetry
  2. Keep: Matching policies contribute their keep values; most restrictive wins
  3. Transform: Surviving telemetry has all matching transforms applied
This parallel model scales to thousands of policies without performance degradation. There’s no sequential bottleneck.

​
Telemetry Types

Edge currently supports two telemetry types:
TypeDescriptionPolicy Actions
LogsLog records with body, severity, attributesFilter, sample, transform
MetricsNumeric measurements with dimensionsFilter only
TracesDistributed traces with spansFilter only (coming soon)
Each policy targets exactly one telemetry type. You cannot mix log and metric matchers in the same policy.

​
Policy Sources

Edge loads policies from its policy providers. Currently two policy providers are supported:
  • File: Local JSON files with file watching for hot reload
  • HTTP/gRPC: Remote endpoints with polling for updates (view the gRPC API)
Multiple sources can be configured. Policies from all sources merge together. The policy ID acts as a unique key. If two providers emit a policy with the same ID, the one from the higher-priority source (HTTP > file) wins. Same-priority sources will have the later update win. This structure allows you to create a set of default policies that can be overridden remotely.

​
Next Steps

Architecture

Understand how Edge is built

Quickstart

Get Edge running in 5 minutes