Effective incident management starts with a solid understanding of the tools at your disposal, and New Relic’s alerting system offers just that. However, to make the most of its capabilities, it’s important to understand the key terms involved.

This guide walks you through essential New Relic alerting terminologies—like conditions, incidents, policies, issues, and alerts—so you can configure and manage alerts that help you respond to issues before they escalate.

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Understanding the key terminologies in New Relic's alerting system is essential for creating, managing, and responding to alerts effectively. Below is an explanation of the main terminologies related to alerts:

1. Conditions

Alert conditions define the specific criteria that, when met, will trigger an alert notification. These conditions are created based on the metrics, events, or logs that you want to monitor within your applications or infrastructure. Conditions can be set up to trigger alerts when a threshold is exceeded or when anomalies are detected, enabling proactive incident management.

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How to Create Alert Conditions

Creating alert conditions in New Relic allows you to monitor your applications and infrastructure for performance issues or anomalies. These conditions are essential in defining the parameters that trigger alerts when specific thresholds are met.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to create alert conditions in New Relic:

1. Access New Relic One

• Go to New Relic One and log in with your credentials.

2. Navigate to Alert Policies

• From the left-hand menu, click on Alerts & AI.
• Select Policies under the Alerts section.

3. Create a New Policy (Optional)

• If you want to add the alert condition to a new policy, click Create a policy. Name your policy and define how incidents should be handled (either per condition, per policy, or per condition and target).
• If you're using an existing policy, skip this step and proceed to the next.

4. Add a New Condition

• After creating or selecting a policy, click Add a condition.
• Choose the condition type: NRQL, APM, Infrastructure, Synthetics, or another condition type that fits your use case.

5. Select Target Entity

• For metric-based alerts, you can select the target entity (such as an application or service) that you want to monitor.
• For NRQL-based alerts, you’ll be prompted to write an NRQL query that will define the metrics you want to monitor.

6. Configure the Condition

• Thresholds: Define the threshold that triggers the alert. You can choose between static thresholds (where you specify an exact number) or dynamic thresholds (which automatically adjust based on historical performance).
• Duration: Set the time window for which the condition must be met before the alert is triggered.
• Critical and Warning Levels: Set up both critical and warning thresholds, giving you multiple levels of alerting based on severity.

7. Set Notification Preferences

• Add notification channels such as Email, Slack, or PagerDuty to ensure your team is informed when an alert condition is triggered.

8. Add Runbook URLs (Optional)

• For easier incident response, you can add a Runbook URL to your condition. This helps guide the on-call team through troubleshooting steps when an alert is triggered.

9. Save the Condition

• Once you’ve configured all the required parameters, click Save condition to activate the alert.

By following these steps, you can effectively create alert conditions in New Relic, enabling proactive monitoring and quicker resolution of incidents.

Note: For more information, visit the official New Relic Alerting Documentation.

2. Incidents

An incident in New Relic is triggered when one or more alert conditions are violated. An incident represents an ongoing issue that needs to be investigated and resolved.

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Incidents are automatically created by the alert system and provide valuable context for tracking the status of alerts over time.

3. Policies

Alert policies group multiple alert conditions together under a single set of rules. A policy is where you define how alerts are handled for a specific service or application.

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By configuring multiple conditions within a single policy, you can ensure that related conditions are treated in a coordinated way, streamlining response efforts and improving incident management.

4. Issues

In New Relic’s alerting system, an issue refers to a real-time event that is actively affecting performance or reliability, such as increased latency or downtime.

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Issues are connected to incidents and provide granular details about what is causing service degradation. Teams can investigate issues to determine the root cause and resolve them efficiently.

5. Alerts

Alerts in New Relic are notifications sent to your team when an incident is detected based on the alert conditions you have configured.

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Alerts can be delivered through various channels such as email, Slack, or integrated tools like PagerDuty. An alert serves as the first signal of an issue that requires attention, enabling teams to investigate and address problems quickly.

Understanding these core terminologies—conditions, incidents, policies, issues, and alerts—lays the foundation for building an effective alerting strategy in New Relic.