The correlation between Datadog APM and Datadog Log Management is improved by the injection of trace IDs, span IDs, env, service, and version as attributes in your logs. With these fields you can find the exact logs associated with a specific service and version, or all logs correlated to an observed trace.

It is recommended to configure your application’s tracer with DD_ENV, DD_SERVICE, and DD_VERSION. This will provide the best experience for adding env, service, and version. See the unified service tagging documentation for more details.

Before correlating traces with logs, ensure your logs are either sent as JSON, or parsed by the proper language level log processor. Your language level logs must be turned into Datadog attributes in order for traces and logs correlation to work.

Note: Traces and logs are sampled independently. Even after correlation is configured, a log may contain a trace ID that refers to a trace that was not ingested or not retained due to trace sampling. This does not indicate a configuration error. For more information, see Log has a trace ID but the associated trace is missing.

To learn more about automatically or manually connecting your logs to your traces, select your language below: