Ingest Smarter: One-Step AWS Log Onboarding with New Relic

Welcome to the first post in our new series focusing on recent updates and powerful new features within New Relic Logging! We're excited to share how we're making log management more efficient, insightful, and integrated. In upcoming articles, we look forward to sharing more on our work with Fluent Bit data lifecycle management and improved APM logs onboarding.

To kick things off, we're addressing a common challenge: ingesting your AWS logs. If you've found onboarding AWS logs complex or time-consuming, you're not alone. Gaining insights from logs across a multitude of services often felt like a significant hurdle, delaying access to critical operational data. That's why we focused on a solution to help you onboard your AWS logs and metrics in a single, streamlined step, allowing you to ingest smarter, not harder.

New Relic recently enhanced AWS Logs onboarding with a streamlined, unified UX that supports both logs and metrics from multiple AWS services — all without manual setup per resource. This new one-step workflow leverages CloudFormation templates to simplify provisioning, increase deployment speed, and reduce engineering overhead. With support for up to 40 log groups or S3 buckets we provide flexible API key management. You can either directly input your API key during setup, or for best practices, securely store it in AWS Secrets Manager, customers can now activate log forwarding with unmatched ease and confidence.

The Challenge: Navigating the AWS Log Labyrinth

For many teams leveraging AWS, the path to comprehensive log observability traditionally involved:

• Complex Configurations: Setting up log forwarding for various AWS services (like CloudWatch, S3, Lambda, RDS, and more) often required navigating intricate setups for each source.
• Time-Consuming Manual Effort: Manual instrumentation, dashboard creation, and ensuring data correlation across different services and accounts could be a significant drain on engineering resources.
• Secure, Streamlined Setup: Eliminate the need for intricate API key management. New Relic’s integration with AWS Secrets Manager ensures secure and straightforward handling of your credentials
• Delayed Insights: The longer it took to ingest and correlate logs, the slower your mean time to resolution (MTTR) for critical issues.

The Solution: One-Step AWS Log Onboarding for Smarter Ingestion

Leveraging AWS CloudFormation templates, you can now automate the instrumentation of both logs and metrics from multiple AWS services. This update introduces a unified onboarding workflow that eliminates repetitive setup tasks — allowing users to configure up to 40 log groups or S3 buckets at once from a single UI. It’s faster, clearer, and easier to manage than before, giving teams a streamlined path to bring critical telemetry into New Relic without manual intervention.

Why This Matters: The Value of Ingesting Smarter

This enhanced onboarding experience delivers immediate improvements to the core New Relic platform experience by streamlining AWS log ingestion. Key benefits include:

Simplified Setup: Get your AWS logs into New Relic quickly through a single onboarding flow that supports CloudWatch, Lambda, S3, and other services (full list in documentation). Using ready-made CloudFormation templates, users can now set up log forwarding for up to 40 groups or buckets at once — no repetitive configuration required.

Operational Efficiency: Minimize setup time and reduce misconfigurations by using a unified UI for onboarding log data. Templates help ensure consistency, especially across environments with multiple sinks or use cases.

How You 'Ingest Smarter'

The power behind New Relic’s one-step AWS log onboarding lies in reducing friction: faster setup, fewer manual steps, and easier choices across environments. Here’s how we help teams ingest smarter:

Easier Setup with CloudFormation

• Reduces the time and complexity of setting up each AWS log source individually.

• New Relic provides prebuilt AWS CloudFormation templates that pre-populate configuration settings. With just a few clicks, users can set up forwarding for up to 40 log groups or buckets from CloudWatch or S3 to New Relic — all from a single, streamlined UI.

Support for Multiple Ingestion Paths

• Different teams have different technical requirements for log forwarding.

• Whether users prefer AWS Lambda for event-based routing or Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose for scalable delivery, New Relic supports multiple paths — enabling teams to tailor ingestion to their architecture.

Improved Context with APM Correlation

• Logs without context make it harder to troubleshoot quickly.

• When logs are ingested alongside APM data, New Relic automatically attaches shared identifiers — like entity IDs — enabling users to correlate logs with performance insights and trace data, without extra setup.

Enhanced Security with AWS Secrets Manager

• Reduces risk by protecting sensitive credentials.

• Users can choose to store their New Relic license key in AWS Secrets Manager. While not a two-way integration, this option helps prevent credentials from being exposed in plain text during setup or provisioning.

Comprehensive Coverage for Key AWS Services

• Ensures you can monitor logs from a wide range of your AWS services.

• Our onboarding flow supports many of the most commonly used AWS services, including Application Load Balancers (ALB), Classic Load Balancers (ELB), CloudFront Distributions, AWS Lambda functions, RDS Instances, and S3 Buckets. This gives users a strong starting point for bringing high-value telemetry into New Relic quickly and reliably.

By handling these setup and configuration complexities, New Relic allows you to focus on what your logs are telling you — rather than how to get them in.

How to Enable Your Streamlined AWS Log Ingestion 

Getting started with New Relic's one-step AWS log onboarding is designed to be straightforward. You can find the walk through guides here & here 

By simplifying the ingestion process, New Relic empowers you to spend less time on setup and more time leveraging your observability data to build better, more reliable software. 

Stay tuned for the next posts in this series, where we’ll explore more advanced logging features and techniques, including our work with improved APM logs onboarding and Fluent Bit data lifecycle management.