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New Relic

The New Relic integration sends application OpenTelemetry traces and metrics alongside Speedscale RRPair logs. New Relic APM shows the application topology, latency, throughput, and errors. When the captured request contains a valid W3C traceparent header, the matching RRPair log carries the trace ID needed for correlation. Requests without that header still appear in Logs but are not linked to an APM trace.

How it works​

The collector sends all signals to New Relic's native OTLP endpoint with an ingest license key. It also:

  • marks spans with HTTP 5xx responses or exception events as errors;
  • identifies the source workload with service.name and speedscale.workload;
  • identifies the remote destination with hostname, server.address, and network.peer.address;
  • emits a readable message and speedscale.protocol, speedscale.command, and speedscale.status for HTTP, PostgreSQL, Kafka, and other captured protocols;
  • extracts W3C trace context from captured request headers;
  • keeps records without W3C trace context searchable instead of discarding them.

No New Relic account ID is needed for OTLP ingest. Keep account IDs, license keys, and partner tenant details out of values files and source control.

Why use it​

New Relic APM identifies the service and span involved in an error. The matching capture log identifies the source workload, remote destination, protocol, command, and status at that point in the trace. Retain the full traffic in Speedscale Cloud or a BYOC object-storage channel when developers need to turn it into a regression test or dependency mock.

Install the channel​

Create an ingest license key in the destination account and store it in a Kubernetes Secret:

kubectl create namespace byoc-newrelic
kubectl -n byoc-newrelic create secret generic newrelic-license-key \
  --from-literal=license-key='<NEW_RELIC_LICENSE_KEY>'

helm upgrade --install byoc-newrelic speedscale-byoc/newrelic \
  --namespace byoc-newrelic \
  --set newrelic.credentialsSecret=newrelic-license-key

The default endpoint is New Relic's US OTLP endpoint. Set newrelic.endpoint to the documented EU, Japan, or FedRAMP base URL when required. Do not add a signal path.

Add one Forwarder exporter for this channel:

forwarder:
  exporters:
    byoc_newrelic:
      otel_endpoint: http://byoc-newrelic-newrelic.byoc-newrelic.svc.cluster.local:4317
      filter_rule: standard
      dlp_config_id: standard

Send application OTLP data to the same collector service on port 4317 for gRPC or 4318 for HTTP.

The chart's NetworkPolicy only admits traffic from the speedscale namespace by default. Add each application namespace that sends OTLP data:

helm upgrade byoc-newrelic speedscale-byoc/newrelic \
  --namespace byoc-newrelic --reuse-values \
  --set 'networkPolicy.allowedNamespaces={speedscale,<APP_NAMESPACE>}'

Verify in New Relic​

Open Logs and paste this Lucene query into the search bar:

msgType:rrpair AND speedscale.direction:OUT

The default table only needs four columns: timestamp, message, hostname, and service.name. service.name is the source service and hostname is the remote destination. For example, an LLM request can show ai-service and api.anthropic.com, while database traffic shows accounts-service and banking-postgres.banking-app.svc.cluster.local.

To focus on one source service, append AND service.name:<SERVICE_NAME> to the query. Records without W3C trace context, such as PostgreSQL and Kafka traffic, are still displayed even though they cannot link to a distributed trace.

New Relic Logs showing outbound LLM traffic with source services and remote hostnames

Open APM & Services separately to confirm that application service throughput and transaction charts contain current data.

New Relic APM service overview with populated throughput and transaction charts

Use the capture with proxymock​

New Relic is the observability view, not the portable RRPair archive. There is no direct proxymock import newrelic command. Retain the same traffic in Speedscale Cloud, Amazon S3, or Google Cloud Storage if developers need to turn a trace into local tests and mocks.

Pull a Speedscale snapshot by ID:

proxymock cloud pull snapshot '<SNAPSHOT_ID>' --out ./newrelic-capture
proxymock mock --in ./newrelic-capture
proxymock replay --in ./newrelic-capture \
  --test-against http://localhost:8080

For an S3 or GCS BYOC channel, retrieve recent RRPairs by service and time range:

proxymock import s3 --bucket '<BUCKET>' --prefix byoc/ \
  --service '<SERVICE_NAME>' --from now-1h --out ./newrelic-capture

# Native GCS uses Google Application Default Credentials.
proxymock import gcs --bucket '<GCS_BUCKET>' --prefix byoc/ \
  --service '<SERVICE_NAME>' --from now-1h --out ./newrelic-capture

See Pull traffic from a BYOC bucket for authentication, filtering, and cluster discovery.

Evidence​

The BYOC chart is rendered and validated with the pinned OpenTelemetry Collector image in CI, including the logs, traces, and metrics pipelines and Secret-backed api-key header. A runtime test sends HTTPS, PostgreSQL, and Kafka RRPairs through the rendered collector in one mixed batch and verifies readable messages, source-service isolation, real upstream hostnames, protocol metadata, and trace behavior.

One-time report export​

The live OTLP channel is separate from speedctl export newrelic, which sends a completed Speedscale report to New Relic as custom events:

speedctl export newrelic '<REPORT_ID>' \
  --accountId '<ACCOUNT_ID>' \
  --insightsKey '<INSERT_KEY>'

Use the live channel for APM and trace correlation. Use the report export when you only need completed replay results in a New Relic dashboard.

A completed Speedscale report in New Relic

References​