If you use New Relic Browser to monitor end-user browser activity, you can now see end-user-originating traces in New Relic's distributed tracing. This document contains:
Benefits of end-user spans in distributed tracing
By enabling New Relic to report browser monitoring data to distributed tracing, you can see the connection between front-end activity and back-end activity. You can see across a full transaction, from time spent by an end user in the web browser, to network activity, to associated back-end services.
Benefits of this feature:
- Quickly spot latencies, errors, and anomalies in the browser or network
- Resolve customer-facing problems more quickly
- All the benefits of distributed tracing applied to your end-user monitoring
Requirements and compatibility
This feature reports same-origin (non-CORS) Fetch and XHR AJAX requests that occur during a browser interaction.
Requirements:
- New Relic APM Pro with distributed tracing enabled
- APM compatibility and requirements for distributed tracing. APM agent version exceptions to that list are:
Language | Minimum version | Release date |
---|---|---|
C | 1.3 | TBD |
Java | 5.9.0 | 12/10/2019 |
PHP | 9.4.0 | 12/05/2019 |
- New Relic Browser Pro + SPA, with distributed tracing enabled
- Browser agent version 1153 or higher
Enable
To enable distributed tracing for New Relic Browser:
- Go to rpm.newrelic.com/browser > (select an app) > Application settings.
- Ensure you meet requirements, including:
- Toggle Distributed tracing on.
- Redeploy the Browser agent. If you use an APM agent to inject Browser code, restart the APM agent.
Find data
Tips for finding and querying data:
- You can find end-user-originating traces in any New Relic One distributed tracing UI.
- In the distributed trace UI, end-user spans are indicated with the
icon.
- To see a span's attributes, select a span in the UI.
- Spans are reported as
Span
data, and can be queried in New Relic. - Query tips:
- Query by browser app name by setting
browserApp.name
to the browser app name. - Query for traces containing at least one browser app span with
browserApp.name is not null
. - Query for traces containing at least one back-end app with
appName is not null
. - Query for traces containing both browser and back-end spans by combining the two previous conditions.
- Query by browser app name by setting
Troubleshooting
If you don't see end-user spans, or are having other distributed tracing issues, see Troubleshooting.