• Log inStart now

View your OpenTelemetry data in New Relic

5 min

lab

This procedure is part of a lab that teaches you how to instrument your application with OpenTelemetry.

Each procedure in the lab builds upon the last, so make sure you've completed the last procedure, Instrument your application with OpenTelemetry, before starting this one.

You've instrumented your database application with OpenTelemetry and you're sending trace data to New Relic.

Here, you move to New Relic to see the kinds of detailed telemetry data that you generated with just a few lines of OpenTelemetry code.

View your data

Step 1 of 14

Log into New Relic.

Step 2 of 14

In the left-hand navigation, click Services - OpenTelemetry:

OpenTelemetry services

Step 3 of 14

Click your service:

OpenTelemetry service

This brings you to a service view that shows trace data from your application, including:

  • Response time
  • Throughput
  • Error rate

OpenTelemetry data on service view

Tip

It can take some time for your OpenTelemetry data to get to New Relic. If you don't see your service yet, wait a few more minutes. If you still don't see data, compare your code to ours.

Step 4 of 14

In the left-hand navigation, click Distributed tracing:

Distributed tracing view

This shows data about the traces that you generated in your service:

  • Trace count
  • Trace duration
  • Traces with errors
  • Trace groups
Step 5 of 14

Trace groups shows shows traces grouped by the name of their root span. Because all of your spans are root spans, there are four trace groups, one for each database function.

Click the create group:

Trace group view

Step 6 of 14

Order the traces by number of errors ascending, and click one of the traces with no errors:

Trace view

Step 7 of 14

Click on the span:

Span performance

Here, you see performance data about the span, such as average duration and throughput.

Step 8 of 14

Click Attributes:

Span attributes

You configured a few of the attributes you see here in your SDK code. For example, the key that the simulator created:

Create key

Now that you've seen the details that you captured in successful operations within your app, take a look at some of those errors.

Step 9 of 14

Back out of this view and click on Events > Errors:

Errors

Here, you see information about those span events:

Exception span events

Step 10 of 14

Click a create error:

Error

Step 11 of 14

Click a trace:

Error

Step 12 of 14

Click the span:

Error span

Here, you see a lot of the same information you saw in the span details, but there's also a new Error Details button.

Step 13 of 14

Click Error Details:

Click error details

Here, you see the details of the exception span event:

Error details

These details include the exception's status code and status description. With this, you know that your users are frequently making create() calls for keys that already exist in the database.

This is great information, but you can see more, including the stack trace of the exception, to further assess the errors.

Step 14 of 14

Click There was 1 span event exception to see further details about your exception:

Click more error details

Here, you see more details about your exception, including its stack trace, type, and timestamp:

More error details

After reviewing this information, you decide that this isn't an error at all, it's a feature. You designed your database to only allow creates on new keys, which is logical. This shouldn't be captured as an error in your code. Doing so could make real errors harder to see.

The reason this is captured as an exception span event in your application is because the context manager that you used automatically records data about uncaught exceptions as span events. To prevent this from happening, while still providing yourself the option of seeing these events, you need to update your code to store a custom span event.

lab

This procedure is part of a lab that teaches you how to instrument your application with OpenTelemetry. Now that you've viewd your data in New Relic, adjust your instrumentation to record a custom span event.

Copyright © 2024 New Relic Inc.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.