How do you reduce noisy or low-value log ingestion? [Intermediate]
Answer
I reduce noisy log ingestion by fixing log levels at the source, removing duplicate logs, filtering known low-value patterns, using structured logs, and moving repetitive numeric signals to metrics. Governance is more effective than after-the-fact cleanup.
Technical explanation
The application should not log every successful request at high detail unless required.
Infrastructure logs such as health checks, sidecar access logs, and retry noise should be sampled or summarized.
A log contract should define required fields, allowed levels, PII rules, and retention.
Hands-on example
Hands-on: analyze Splunk ingest by source and sourcetype. Identify that 35 percent is /health access logs. Add ingress/collector filtering to drop health checks, change app success logs to INFO summaries, preserve errors, and verify incident debugging still has trace_id and request context.
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