Redact Captured Data

Redaction should happen before sensitive data leaves the app process. isplay applies default pattern redaction plus optional capture policy rules.

Configure Policy

const client = init({
  projectId: process.env.ISPLAY_PROJECT_ID!,
  capturePolicy: {
    defaultAction: "capture",
    rules: [
      { path: "customer.email", action: "mask", reason: "PII" },
      { path: "headers.authorization", action: "drop", reason: "secret" },
      { path: "payment.cardNumber", action: "mask", reason: "PCI" }
    ],
  },
});

Actions

encrypt, artifact_only, and metadata_only are not capture policy actions in v0.3.

What Default Redaction Catches

Default redaction masks common emails, phone numbers, API-key-like tokens, JWTs, credit-card-like numbers, and secret-looking object keys.

Do not rely only on defaults for regulated data. Add explicit path rules for domain fields.

Redaction Reports

Capture metadata includes a redaction report with:

• fieldsDropped
• fieldsMasked
• fieldsHashed
• patternsMatched

Use this to audit whether a trace was aggressively redacted or unexpectedly raw.

Advice

• Redact at the app boundary, not only before reporting.
• Prefer masking stable identifiers over dropping them when analysts need to match records.
• Do not store secrets in metadata. Metadata is still persisted.
• Treat artifacts as sensitive even when redactionState says redacted.
• Keep a project-level data handling policy so adapter authors make consistent choices.