Introduction

The Flare protocol defines how error reports, performance traces, logs, and sourcemaps are sent to Flare's ingestion API. It is the contract between your application's SDK and the Flare backend.

Endpoints

Flare exposes four ingestion endpoints:

• Errors for sending error reports with stacktraces, context attributes, and timeline events.
• Traces for sending performance traces containing spans and span events.
• Logs for sending structured log records with severity levels and trace correlation.
• Sourcemaps for uploading JavaScript sourcemaps to resolve bundled code in error stacktraces.

OpenTelemetry

The protocol is inspired by OpenTelemetry (OTEL). The traces and logs endpoints are fully OTEL-compliant, so any OpenTelemetry-compatible exporter can send data to Flare without modification.

For error reporting, Flare uses a dedicated endpoint. OTEL doesn't define an error reporting format, but Flare's error protocol borrows concepts like resources, scopes, attributes, and events to keep things consistent across all endpoints.

Building an SDK

If you're building a Flare SDK for a new language or framework, implement the errors, traces, and logs endpoints and follow the attribute conventions documented in this section.

These docs also serve as a good reference for AI agents tasked with implementing a Flare client library.

The current span types, attributes and aggregations are primarily designed around PHP and Laravel. If you're building a client for another language or framework, or if you'd like to see new aggregation types, reach out to us. We're happy to work with you on adding new container span types, aggregations, or attributes that make sense for your stack.