DevOps teams have a lot to monitor as systems grow increasingly complex and it can be hard to keep track of what is going on, where. Notifications is a suite of tools that enable you to get the right information to the right people as soon as possible. Notifications send notification events to third-party services, such as Slack, Jira, ServiceNow, and email. You can also use webhooks to send your data to any compatible third-party service.
How notifications work
Once you've configured your alert conditions and policies to identify irregular behavior in your system, it is important to notify the right people on your team of any potential problems. New Relic created workflows so you can control when and where you want to receive notifications about issues. This allows you to funnel the right information to the relevant person or team. Workflows also give you the opportunity to enrich your notifications with additional New Relic data.
Workflows use destinations and channels to send alerts notifications to your team. You need to configure both destinations and channels in order for workflows to function seamlessly.
Destinations indicate where and how your information is being sent. For example, let's say you want to make sure that any time New Relic identifies any latency in your recent deployment it notifies a team Slack channel. You would create a destination to define the where (slack) and the how (any api keys or oauth tokens needed to send it).
Channels define what is being sent. In the scenario above, let's say you want the message in the team slack channel to read "latency identified in x application." You would configure a channel to create the message.
Workflows
The first step in notification management is to create a workflow. Workflows are the systems you use to control your notifications. In workflows you can create filters to decide when the workflow will run, create channels, and add enrichments. Enrichments are data that will be fetched from NRDB and appear in the outgoing events.
Learn more about creating workflows in our workflow documentation.
Destinations
Once a workflow is created, you can create your destinations. Use destinations to integrate, send notifications, and share data between New Relic and your third-party systems. A destination contains the location where the notifications will be sent. Destinations are reusable and can be used across New Relic products.
Learn more about creating destinations in our destination documentation.
Channels
Once a workflow is created you can configure the eventual notification events and map New Relic data to your third-party services using a channel, also known as a message template. A Channel enables you to customize your notification event data before it's sent to your third-party destination.
Learn more about creating channels in our channel documentation.
API
You can also use our NerdGraph API to view and configure destinations and notification channels.
Security
Credentials used for destinations and notification channels are stored securely according to New Relic security standards.