Summary

This branch makes Vector's internal logging significantly more production-ready by:

• Preventing log flooding by default (rate limiting ON)
  • todo: remove redundant tags - will followup in another PR
• Maintaining existing rate limiting behavior
• Improving developer experience (comprehensive docs + easy opt-out mechanisms)
• Setting foundation for future improvements

Technically a breaking change but very minor impact.

Vector configuration

How did you test this PR?

Change Type

• Bug fix
• New feature
• Non-functional (chore, refactoring, docs)
• Performance

Is this a breaking change?

• Yes
• No

Does this PR include user facing changes?

• Yes. Please add a changelog fragment based on our guidelines.
• No. A maintainer will apply the no-changelog label to this PR.

References

Related: #22410

Notes

• Please read our Vector contributor resources.
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  • Alternatively, we recommend running the following locally before pushing to the remote branch:
    • make fmt
    • make check-clippy (if there are failures it's possible some of them can be fixed with make clippy-fix)
    • make test
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  • For example, you can run git merge origin master and git push.
• If this PR introduces changes Vector dependencies (modifies Cargo.lock), please
  run make build-licenses to regenerate the license inventory and commit the changes (if any). More details here.