New Relic announced enhancements to its Application Performance Monitoring (APM) to automatically collect logs in context with application metrics and traces.

Logs are critical for observability, and automatically coupling logs collection with APM allows engineers to immediately investigate relevant logs associated with their other telemetry data, helping them troubleshoot their applications faster. This new feature improves upon the already 3X+ more value that New Relic customers receive compared to other observability platforms, which require 13+ different SKUs with disjointed experiences and legacy product-based pricing models.

Collecting logs can be a complex, manual, and often frustrating experience. Developers often have to request access to specific hosts and configure non-standard log forwarding to collect application logs separate from their APM metrics. To address these common limitations, New Relic updated its Java, Ruby, and .NET APM agents to automatically collect and ingest application logs. With this new feature, New Relic is making logging easier for developers by simplifying log forwarding directly from the APM agent, providing logs in context, and enhancing the APM UI to surface relevant logs that are automatically associated with other telemetry data for APM to reduce context-switching. Engineers no longer need to worry about manual and non-standard log forwarding, and will still get granular configuration options to tailor log collection with the option to opt out anytime.

“Our customers have told us that they experience two primary problems when it comes to logging: first is the ability to collect log data; second is contextualizing the data to make it actionable. When troubleshooting an issue, our customers shouldn’t have to context switch across the UI to navigate the wealth of available information,” said New Relic SVP and Product GM, Wendy Shepperd. “Now with a single agent deployment for the supported application languages, engineers get a simple yet holistic solution to quickly see and act on all their telemetry in context. The new functionality curates the data automatically, such as entity GUIDs for related APM service entities, including application logs, so that highly correlated telemetry logs are already visible right out of the box.”

With the latest versions of Java, Ruby, and .NET agents for supported frameworks, New Relic customers can view application logs in context of APM metrics, traces and events, removing the need to switch between screens; collect and forward logs to New Relic with little to maintain or relying on manual configurations; and access logs inside APM with enhanced UI improvements. In addition, the update includes robust support to ensure security, compliance and control:

- Data Security: Mask, obfuscate, and prevent sending PII, PHI, or any other sensitive data via detailed security configurations.

- Ingest Control: Use in-agent log sampling to manage ingested volume and avoid double-billing to continue to receive 3X more value than alternate log management solutions.

- Compliance: Log collection disabled by default for HIPAA, FedRAMP and accounts where High Security Mode is in use, even after the agent is upgraded.

- Opt-out Anytime: Turn off automatic forwarding by configuring your agent anytime or from the data management hub in New Relic.

New Relic Application Performance Monitoring with the automatic logs-in-context feature is generally available for Java 7.7.0, Ruby 8.7.0, and .NET 9.7.2 agent versions. New Relic will enable automatic logs in context for Node.js, Python, Go, and PHP agents over the coming quarters.