Working with Drains

Drains let you forward observability data from your applications to external services for debugging, performance optimization, analysis, and alerting, so that you can:

• Store observability data persistently in your preferred external services
• Process large volumes of telemetry data using your own tools
• Set up alerts based on application behavior patterns
• Build custom metrics and dashboards from your data

You can add Drains in two ways:

• Custom Drains: Configure any data type to send to custom HTTP endpoints
• Integrations: Managed Drains to popular services (logs only)

Learn how to manage your active drains.

You can drain four types of data:

• Logs: Runtime, build, and static logs from your deployments
• Traces: Distributed tracing data in OpenTelemetry format
• Speed Insights: Performance metrics and web vitals
• Web Analytics: Page views and custom events

Each drain data type has specific formats, fields, and schemas. Review the reference documentation for logs, traces, speed insights, and analytics to understand the data structure you'll receive from each data type.

You can secure your drains by checking for valid signatures and hiding IP addresses. Learn how to add security to your drains.

Drains are available to all users on the Pro and Enterprise plans. If you are on the Hobby or Pro Trial plan, you'll need to upgrade to Pro to access drains.

Drains usage is billed based on the pricing table below. Pricing is the same regardless of data type:

See Optimizing Drains for information on how to manage costs associated with Drains.

For more information on Drains, check out the following resources:

• Configure Drains
• Log Drains reference
• Traces reference
• Speed Insights reference
• Analytics reference