Browser data in distributed tracing

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:

Language Minimum version Release date
C 1.3 TBD
Java 5.9.0 12/10/2019
PHP 9.4.0 12/05/2019

Enable

To enable distributed tracing for New Relic Browser:

  1. Go to rpm.newrelic.com/browser > (select an app) > Application settings.
  2. Ensure you meet requirements, including:
  3. Toggle Distributed tracing on.
  4. 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 New Relic distributed tracing browser span icon 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.

Troubleshooting

If you don't see end-user spans, or are having other distributed tracing issues, see Troubleshooting.

For more help

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