Handling error rate in OpenTelemetry and New Relic

The methods used to define, capture, and present errors differ between New Relic application performance monitoring (APM) services and OpenTelemetry APM services. While New Relic defines an error as any transaction with an unhandled exception, OpenTelemetry does not have a concept of transactions but instead uses spans to represent operations within a transaction. As a result, the error rate graphs display different values for the same service when comparing the two platforms, highlighting the fundamental differences in their models and instrumentation methods. To bridge this gap, New Relic relies on SpanKind to map trace data to its concept of a transaction, while OpenTelemetry defines transactions based on root spans with a status code of ERROR. This difference in approach means that there is no direct apples-to-apples comparison for error rate between the two platforms, and users must re-establish their error baselines when moving between instrumentation methods.