OpenTelemetry in the UI: Transactions page

After you've sent us your OpenTelemetry data and opened your service (entity) in the UI, click on Transactions to identify slow transactions that might be causing a spike in your application's response time. Once you identify a transaction with a problem, you can drill in to details on that transaction's performance and see distributed traces involving that transaction.

New Relic's notion of a transaction encapsulates one logical unit of work in a software application--generally, this is work performed by a single process.

Metrics or spans

You can choose to use either metrics or spans to power the the Transactions view.

Important

When choosing metrics, transactions are only shown for HTTP servers. Transactions for gRPC service methods or other protocols are not yet shown.

Required attributes

With OpenTelemetry, we rely on SpanKind for mapping trace data to our concept of a transaction. A SpanKind of server or consumer is used to identify the entry point of a process. In other words, these are spans that are either root spans or child spans of a remote process.

For your OpenTelemetry data to appear in the Transactions page, make sure it has the following attributes, in accordance with the OTel semantic conventions:

Metrics or spans?	Description
Metrics	`http.server.duration` Facets by `http.route` OR `http.target`
Spans	`span.kind = server` or `consumer` Facets by span `name`

To learn about OpenTelemetry in other UI pages, see the UI overview.