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Send Vercel logs & traces to Aient with a Drain

A Vercel Drain forwards your project’s observability data to any HTTPS endpoint. Point one at Aient and your Vercel function logs and traces flow straight into Aient’s detection and remediation loop — no SDK to install, no code to change. Aient reads the stack traces inside your Vercel function errors, groups them into problems, finds the root cause against your source code, and opens a reviewed GitHub pull request with the fix. The Drain is the fastest way to get there: near-zero instrumentation, and it reuses telemetry Vercel already collects.
A Drain carries one data type each. To send both logs and traces, you add two Drains — one for Logs, one for Traces — each pointed at its own Aient URL.

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What you get

  • Logs → crash-class problems. Vercel function logs (lambda, edge, build, and more) arrive in Aient. Error- and fatal-level records surface as problems, and the stack traces inside them feed automated root cause analysis.
  • Traces → distributed context. Vercel sends traces as OpenTelemetry over OTLP/HTTP. Aient ingests them as-is, keeping the project and deployment context Vercel attaches.
  • Closed-loop remediation. Once a crash-class problem is detected, Aient investigates and opens a GitHub pull request with the fix. You review and merge — Aient never merges for you.

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Prerequisites

  • A Vercel project emitting logs and/or traces.
  • A Vercel Pro or Enterprise plan. Per Vercel’s Drains docs, Drains are available on Pro and Enterprise; Hobby and Pro Trial plans must upgrade to Pro first. Vercel bills Drains volume separately on its side.
  • An Aient account with an environment to receive the data.
  • A per-environment Drain URL and Signature Verification Secret from Aient (see Get your Drain URL and secret).

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Get your Drain URL and secret

In Aient, go to Settings → Environments, open the environment you want Vercel data to land in, and select the Vercel Drains tab. Click Add drain, choose the data type (Logs or Traces), and create it. Aient then shows you, once:
  • A Drain URL — a per-organisation, per-data-type endpoint on the Aient ingest domain (ingest.aient.ai), served by the native Vercel-drain receiver. It looks like: 
    https://ingest.aient.ai/vercel/<your-drain-token>/logs
https://ingest.aient.ai/vercel/<your-drain-token>/traces
    The Drain URL contains a secret token. Treat the whole URL as a credential: send it over HTTPS only, never commit it, and never paste it into a public issue.
  • A Signature Verification Secret — an HMAC secret you paste into Vercel’s “Signature Verification Secret” field. Aient uses it to verify that every Drain request genuinely came from your Vercel project before accepting the data.
The signing secret is shown once and cannot be retrieved later. Copy both the URL and the secret before closing the dialog. If you lose the secret, use Rotate on the drain to mint a fresh URL + secret pair (and update Vercel with the new values). You can also Revoke a drain — a confirmation-gated action that immediately stops accepting its traffic.
Create one drain for Logs and one for Traces (they are separate drains with separate tokens), then copy each pair before you start the Vercel steps below.

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Set up the Drain in Vercel

In your Vercel dashboard, go to Settings → Drains → Add Drain and follow the three steps. Repeat the whole flow once for Logs and once for Traces.

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Step 1 — Choose the data type

Pick Logs or Traces. These are the two types Aient ingests.
Vercel Add Drain dialog at step one, Choose data to drain, with Logs, Traces, Speed Insights and Web Analytics options; Traces is selected.
Speed Insights and Web Analytics are not supported by Aient — they are not error telemetry and carry no crash signal. Choose only Logs or Traces.
Click Next.

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Step 2 — Configure the drain

Name the drain, choose which projects send data, and optionally add sampling rules per environment.
Vercel Add Drain dialog at step two, Configure the drain, showing drain name, project selection, and a sampling rule with environment, rate and request path prefix.
Recommended settings:
  • Projects — start with the specific projects you want Aient watching.
  • Environment — start with production. Add preview later if you want preview deployments covered too.
  • Sampling — leave sampling at 100% for launch so nothing is dropped while you confirm the connection works. Once telemetry is flowing, you can lower the rate (for example to 10%) and pin noisy paths like /docs to a low percentage.
Sampling rules drop non-matching requests silently. With zero rules, Vercel forwards 100%. As soon as you add any rule, requests that don’t match a rule are dropped. Rules are evaluated top-to-bottom, first match wins. Start at 100% and tighten deliberately.
Click Next.

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Step 3 — Configure the destination (Custom Endpoint)

Choose Custom Endpoint and fill in:
Vercel Add Drain dialog at step three, Configure the destination, with the Custom Endpoint tab selected showing a POST URL field, JSON encoding, a Test button, and a Signature Verification Secret field.
  1. URL — paste the Aient Drain URL for this data type (the …/logs URL on a Logs drain, the …/traces URL on a Traces drain).
  2. Encoding — for Traces, either JSON or Protobuf works; Aient accepts both. For Logs, use Vercel’s default.
  3. Signature Verification Secret — paste the Aient Signature Verification Secret.
    Always set the secret. It lets Aient verify each request and reject anything that isn’t from your Vercel project.
  4. Click Test. Vercel sends a sample request to the Aient URL; a success confirms the URL and secret are correct.
  5. Click Create Drain.
That’s it for one data type. Repeat steps 1–3 for the other Drain (Logs or Traces) using its matching Aient URL.

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What to expect in Aient

Once the Drain is live and your app produces telemetry:
  1. Telemetry arrives. Logs and traces land in Aient, stamped to your organisation and environment. Back in Settings → Environments → Vercel Drains, each drain shows a health indicator — Receiving once valid data is flowing, or Signature failing if requests arrive but the signature doesn’t verify (usually a stale secret in Vercel — rotate and re-paste).
  2. Problems appear. Error- and fatal-level logs, and trace errors, are grouped into problems — the same pipeline as Aient’s SDK ingest. No extra setup.
  3. Root cause + fix PR. For crash-class problems that resolve to a stack frame in a repo Aient can read, Aient investigates the root cause and opens a reviewed GitHub pull request. You review and merge; Aient then watches production to confirm the fix held, and reopens the problem if it regresses.
A note on symbolication. Vercel log records carry no git commit SHA, so log-sourced exceptions may symbolicate less precisely than your trace or SDK telemetry. Aient still ingests them and still produces problems; it just degrades gracefully to raw frames when the SHA is absent. For the sharpest stack traces, upload source maps and lean on trace ingestion, where deployment context is preserved.

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FAQ

No. A Drain forwards telemetry Vercel already collects. This is the near-zero instrumentation path: configure the Drain in Vercel, paste the Aient URL and secret, and data flows. You can still add the Aient SDK later for richer, app-level spans.
Create both for full coverage. Logs carry your Vercel function output, including error and fatal records that surface crash-class problems. Traces carry OpenTelemetry spans with distributed context. Each is a separate Drain because Vercel allows one data type per drain.
Your Drain URL identifies your organisation, and the Signature Verification Secret proves each request actually came from your Vercel project. Vercel signs every request with an HMAC-SHA1 of the raw request body and sends it in the x-vercel-signature header; Aient recomputes that HMAC with your secret and rejects anything that doesn’t match (a constant-time compare, fail-closed) — so a leaked URL alone can’t be used to inject telemetry.
Logs arrive as newline-delimited / concatenated JSON objects (one log record per line) and Aient normalises them into OpenTelemetry log records. Traces arrive as OpenTelemetry over OTLP/HTTP — in JSON or Protobuf, your choice — and Aient passes them through, keeping the vercel.projectId and vercel.deploymentId context Vercel attaches.
That’s the goal. Aient collapses the slow part of an incident — triage and writing the fix — into an automated root cause analysis that ends in a ready-to-review pull request. The Drain removes the instrumentation step, so a Vercel app can reach closed-loop AI incident management quickly.
Yes, entirely from Vercel. Scope Drains per project and per environment, choose which log sources to forward, and use sampling rules to cap volume. Start at 100% to confirm the connection, then tighten. Remember that once any sampling rule exists, non-matching requests are dropped.
No. Aient ingests Logs and Traces only — those carry the error signal Aient acts on. Speed Insights and Web Analytics are out of scope.