Create conditions

Use the UI or NerdGraph API to create NRQL conditions for basic NRQL queries that return a number.

See APM metric alert conditions for tips about creating APM conditions using NRQL.

Anomaly alerting allows you to create conditions that dynamically adjust to changing data and trends, such as weekly or seasonal patterns. This feature is available for APM and browser monitoring apps, as well as NRQL queries.

With multi-location Synthetic monitoring conditions, you can set up a monitor to notify you when a specific number of locations are failing at the same time.

For APM, you can set up conditions for key transactions.

You can set thresholds that open a violation when they are breached by any of your Java app's instance metrics.

By scoping thresholds to specific instances, you can more quickly identify where potential problems are originating. This is useful, for example, to detect anomalies that are occurring only in a subset of your app's instances. These sorts of anomalies are easy to miss for apps that aggregate metrics across a large number of instances.

For Java apps monitored by APM, you can set thresholds that open a violation when the heap size or number of threads for a single JVM is out of the expected operating range.

We calculate alerting threshold violations individually for each of the app's selected instances. When creating your condition, select JVM health metric as the type of condition for your Java app's alert policy, then select any of the available thresholds:

• Deadlocked threads

• Heap memory usage

• CPU utilization time

• Garbage collection CPU time

  Violations will automatically close when the inverse of the threshold is met, but by using the UI you can also change the time when a violation force-closes for a JVM health metric. Default is 24 hours.

We include the option to define a percentile as the threshold for your condition when your web app's response time is above, below, or equal to this value. This is useful, for example, when Operations personnel want to alert on a percentile for an app server's overall web transaction response time rather than the average web response time.

To define the percentile threshold:

1. Select Web transactions percentiles as the type of condition for your APM app's condition, then select a single app. (To alert on more than one app, create an individual Web transactions percentiles condition for each.)

2. To define the thresholds that open the violation, type the Percentile nth response time value, then select its frequency (above, below, or equal to this value).

   We store the transaction time in milliseconds, although the user interface shows the Critical and Warning values as seconds. If you want to define milliseconds, be sure to include the decimal point in your value.

By applying labels to applications, you can automatically link these entities to your condition. This makes it easy to manage all the applications within a dynamic environment. We recommend using the agent configuration file to best maintain entity labels.

A single label identifies all entities associated with that label (maximum 10,000 entities). Multiple labels only identify entities which share all the selected labels.

Using dynamic targeting with your condition also requires that you set a violation close timer.

To add, edit, or remove up to ten labels for a condition:

1. Select APM > Application metric as the product type.

2. When identifying entities, select the Labels tab. Search for a label by name, or select a label from the list of categories.

   You can also create conditions directly within the context of what you are monitoring with Infrastructure.

You can create conditions for your resources directly in Infrastructure.

For example, if you want to be notified when we have stopped receiving data from an Infrastructure agent, use the host not reporting condition type. This allows you to dynamically alert on filtered groups of hosts and configure the time window from 5 to 60 minutes.