🤫 Sensitive information collection

☀️

Helios is a dev-first observability platform that helps dev and ops teams shorten time to find and fix issues in distributed applications. Built on OpenTelemetry, Helios provides traces and correlates them with logs and metrics, enabling end-to-end app visibility and faster troubleshooting.

Instrumenting running application data to provide distributed tracing driven observability, as is the case with any telemetry or monitoring system, might introduce a new risk that sensitive information could be inadvertently captured and transmitted.

In order to support different risk profiles and business policies, Helios exposes various layers of control in order to set and select what data is instrumented and how. The layers go from instrumenting all data to collecting only metadata and everything in between.

The Helios SDK offers both allowlist and blocklist capabilities to ensure the sensitive data collected is in compliance with your company's policies and needs. It also supports a mode in which only metadata is collected, in case this is the desired configuration. Or, simply blocking specific paths from being collected altogether.

The table below outlines the layers provided in Helios to leverage distributed tracing a way that meets your team's privacy requirements:

Helios also exposes the hash function so that you can use the obfuscated data consistently when testing or troubleshooting.