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Log Drains

4 posts · Jan 2020 – Sep 2025

What this trail covers

Vercel Drains (formerly Log Drains) now support exporting OpenTelemetry traces, Web Analytics events, and Speed Insights metrics in addition to logs. This provides a unified pipeline for streaming complete observability data to external systems like Datadog, Honeycomb, Grafana, and Elastic. Data is correlated across logs, traces, analytics, and performance metrics, enabling end-to-end observability. Drains can be configured as custom HTTP endpoints or through turnkey integrations. New native integrations from Sentry, Checkly, and Dash0 are now available on the Vercel Marketplace, allowing users to connect their preferred observability tools directly with integrated billing and SSO, further enhancing the unified workflow for debugging and monitoring applications.

All Vercel trails
  1. Introducing Vercel Drains: Complete observability data, anywhereThis post announces the rebranding of Vercel Log Drains to Vercel Drains and expands their functionality to include exporting OpenTelemetry traces, Web Analytics events, and Speed Insights metrics. It details the importance of unified observability data beyond just logs, highlighting how correlated signals (logs enriched with trace IDs) provide a continuous view of application behavior. The post describes two methods for draining data: custom drains to any HTTP endpoint with configurable data types, sampling rates, and formats (JSON, NDJSON, Protobuf), and turnkey integration drains with vendors like Dash0, Statsig, Datadog, Logflare. It emphasizes the advantage of end-to-end observability by tying performance spikes to specific traces and logs, and notes that traces follow the OpenTelemetry protocol for compatibility with various APM tools. Drains are available on Pro and Enterprise plans, billed at $0.50 per GB.
  2. Expanding observability on VercelThis post announces the expansion of Vercel's observability offerings through new native integrations on the Vercel Marketplace (Sentry, Checkly, Dash0). It highlights the integration of Log Drains for native integrations, enabling users to send logs to external systems like Dash0 for deeper insights. The core technical contribution is the enablement of these third-party observability tools to connect directly to Vercel projects, providing a unified workflow for developers to monitor, measure, and debug their applications without custom setup or changes to their build/deploy process.
  3. Vercel MonitoringThis post announces the general availability of Vercel Monitoring for Pro and Enterprise teams, and the release of Logs for all plans. Monitoring provides real-time insights for identifying production issues and optimizing application performance. Logs allow for drilling down into errors and issues on production and preview deployments, with the ability to view historical logs. Custom queries and integration with third-party tools via Log Drains are highlighted. A quote from Keystone Education mentions using Monitoring to detect bots causing issues.
  4. Refined Logging on VercelThis post introduces a refined UI for build logs and serverless function logs (real-time requests and errors). It also reiterates the availability of Log Drains for piping logs to external inspection tools.
  5. Log Drains on VercelIntroduced Log Drains to forward deployment logs (Build Step, Runtime, Edge Network) via HTTPS, HTTP, TLS, and TCP to external logging services. Supported JSON, NDJSON, and Syslog formats. Launched integrations with LogDNA and Datadog. Benefits include persisted storage, large volume storage, alerting, and metric generation from logs.