Grafana Adaptive Logs Drop Rules Cut Log Noise Now
Grafana Labs has launched a new drop rules feature within Adaptive Logs, now available in public preview on Grafana Cloud. The feature gives platform and observability teams a direct way to filter out low-value logs before they ever reach Grafana Cloud Logs.
Most teams already know which logs are noise. Health check logs, forgotten DEBUG entries, and verbose INFO output from rarely-used services all inflate bills without adding insight. The problem has always been removal. Until now, there was no simple way to drop these logs from within Grafana Cloud without going through complex infrastructure change management.
Adaptive Logs drop rules change that. Each rule lets teams define logic using any combination of log labels, detected log levels, or line content. The rules apply before ingestion, so the savings are immediate. Teams can drop DEBUG logs entirely, apply a percentage-based sample to chatty but occasionally useful logs, or target a specific service that has started generating excessive output. The full documentation explains how each configuration works.
Drop rules fit into a three-stage evaluation system within Adaptive Logs. First, exemptions protect high-priority logs and pass them through untouched. Next, drop rules run in priority order, with the first matching rule applying its configured drop rate. Finally, pattern-based recommendations handle any remaining logs that were not already exempted or filtered. This layered approach gives teams control at every stage of the pipeline.
Together, these three mechanisms form a complete log cost management system. Drop rules handle the noise teams already know about. Recommendations, which analyze 15 days of query behavior, surface waste that no one has spotted yet. Exemptions lock in the logs teams cannot afford to lose, audit trails, payment processing errors, and compliance-critical streams stay fully protected. When incidents require full visibility, teams can also pause Adaptive Logs for one hour to override active drops.
Getting started is straightforward. In Grafana Cloud, navigate to Adaptive Telemetry → Adaptive Logs → Drop rules tab → Create a new drop rule. Grafana recommends starting with a simple rule, for example, dropping 90% of debug-level logs from a known-noisy service. Rules take effect immediately, and impact is visible on the drop rules page. Because this is an admin experience, creating rules requires the Adaptive Logs admin role, which Grafana Admins and Org Admins receive by default. Teams can also use gcx, Grafana’s new CLI tool, to create and manage drop rules from the terminal.
Adaptive Logs, including the new Adaptive Logs drop rules feature, is included at no extra cost across all Grafana Cloud tiers.
