Use APM agent APIs with logs in context

To correlate log data with other telemetry data, such as errors and distributed traces in APM, you can use our logs in context solutions. If your logging framework is not available with our existing logs in context solutions, you can configure your logging libraries by using API calls to annotate your logs.

APM agent trace metadata and linking metadata APIs

To get properly annotated logs for logs in context, use the following API calls for your APM agent. These APIs pass the required trace metadata and linking metadata to link your log data to other New Relic data.

APM agent APIs:

APM agent	API calls
C SDK (n/a)	See our Log API documentation.
Go	GetTraceMetadata GetLinkingMetadata
Java	getTraceMetadata getLinkingMetadata
.NET	TraceMetadata GetLinkingMetadata
Node.js	newrelic.getTraceMetadata newrelic.getLinkingMetadata
PHP	newrelic_get_trace_metadata newrelic_get_linking_metadata For PHP, logs in context is only supported from the distributed tracing UI, not in the Logs tab of the APM UI.
Python	get_linking_metadata
Ruby	linking_metadata current_trace_id current_span_id

Resources for correctly annotating logs

For more information about using the trace metadata and linking metadata APIs to annotate logs for logs in context, review the APM agent specifications in GitHub. These specifications include the required fields and properly formatted output.

Also, review the source code for our own manually installed logs in context extensions to see how we use these APIs:

C SDK: n/a
Go: Logrus extension
Java: Log4j2 extension
.NET: Serilog extension
Node.js: Winston extension, Pino extension
PHP: Monolog extension
Python: Streamhandler example
Ruby: logging.rb extension