Manage error data

New Relic's APM Errors page helps you identify, triage, and fix errors in your services. The Errors page uses data collected by the APM agent to display stack traces, transaction attributes such as HTTP header values, and any other custom attributes, so you can understand the context of the error and fix it.

View logs for your APM and infrastructure data

You can also bring your logs and application's data together to make troubleshooting easier and faster. With logs in context, you can see log messages related to your errors and traces directly in your app's UI. You can also see logs in context of your infrastructure data, such as Kubernetes clusters. No need to switch to another UI page.

Error data types: events and trace details

By default, our APM agents collect two type of error data:

• Events
• Trace details

Events

The error event data type includes default attributes, as well as any custom attributes instrumented in your service. It doesn't include a stack trace.

Find your events data in the Errors UI as follows:

• The Errors column in the Error traces table.
• The Top 5 errors chart.
• When you’ve drilled into a grouping of errors, those errors not displaying a stack trace are based on this type of data.
• You can disable Show only errors with stack trace to show errors that have this type of data collected, but no associated trace details.

Events are subject to sampling (see Caps on error reporting and Charting error rates and counts). For more on error event data, see Events reported by APM.

Trace details

The trace details error data type includes stack traces and attributes, and supplements events with more data. It's expected that more events will be reported than trace details--see Caps on error reporting.

Find your trace details data in the Errors UI as follows:

• The Stack traces column of the Error traces table.
• When you’ve drilled into a grouping of errors, those errors with a stack trace use this type of data.

Show only errors with stack trace is enabled by default, to constrain the errors shown to just those that have this type of data collected.

This data is governed by specific retention rules for Error details.

Caps on error reporting

New Relic caps error reporting at:

• 100 events per minute per agent instance
• 20 trace details per minute per agent instance

These caps prevent error reporting from negatively impacting application performance.

Examples:

• App running across five EC2 instances, one JVM each. New Relic caps error reporting at:
  • 100 events per minute x 5 instances = 500 events per minute
  • 20 trace details per minute x 5 instances = 100 trace details per minute
• App running on one host with ten instances. New Relic caps error reporting at:
  • 100 events per minute x 10 instances = 1000 events per minute
  • 20 trace details per minute x 10 instances = 200 events per minute

Charting error rates and counts

The Error rate chart is driven by a query on metric timeslice data, which is an unsampled aggregate data type that is accurate but has very limited dimensionality. This data can't be faceted or filtered as flexibly as error event data.

You can reproduce this chart in a dashboard, or explore the metric timeslice data further by clicking the ... menu on the Error rate chart, and then using the View query or Add to dashboard options.

To chart faceted error counts using event data, as in the Top 5 errors chart, use an NRQL event query. Click the ... menu on the Top 5 errors chart and choose View query for a starting point in creating your chart.

Since event data can be sampled (see Caps on error reporting), you can use the EXTRAPOLATE keyword to get an accurate error count, even if sampling is occurring.

Report custom errors

You can report errors not collected by default with our agents using our agent APIs. For more, see the documentation on the API.

Ignore errors

You can prevent certain errors that would normally be reported to New Relic from being collected using our agent APIs or the server-side configuration UI. For more details, see Manage errors in APM.

Reduce noise with expected errors

Sometimes you want to collect error data, but not have those errors wake you up through alerts. Using the agent API, you can mark such errors as “expected”. They’ll still be visible in the Errors page, but won’t affect your service’s error rate or Apdex metrics.

Disable error traces

To prevent certain errors from being reported to New Relic, disable them in your agent's configuration file. For most agents, you can ignore certain error codes or disable errors completely. For more information, see your specific agent's configuration documentation:

• C SDK
• Go (not applicable; the agent only reports errors when configured to do so)
• Java
• .NET
• Node.js
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby

Delete error traces

In addition to deleting error traces, you may also want to delete transaction traces or database/slow SQL traces. This will remove potentially sensitive data while retaining your other application data (such as Apdex, deployment information, etc.).