A policy is a group of one or more conditions. This document explains how to create a policy and how to view existing policies. You can also use the NerdGraph API (our GraphQL) or the REST API.
For an explanation of how policies interact and relate to alert conditions, workflows, and other components, see concepts and workflows.
Best practices for naming and organising policies
New Relic policies help organize alert conditions into coherent and manageable units. Beyond just categorization, they give some control over incident correlation and the dissemination of notifications about potential issues.
We recommend three common organizational patterns for structuring alert policies and conditions:
Policies organized by... | Comments |
|---|---|
Architecture | Targets or resources in your organization may have different people responsible for their well-being. Common segments may include the environment type (production, staging, integration, development) or the target or resource type (app server code, client-side code, databases, hosts, etc.). To make these types of policies easier to identify, you can give them names based on your architecture. For example:
|
Teams | Specific teams may be responsible for parts of your architecture. For example, you may want to name their policy |
Individuals | Policies set up for specific individuals may be useful when they want to personally keep an eye on a particular resource or metric. This provides them the freedom to add and remove conditions as well as adjust thresholds whenever they want, without having to communicate those changes to others. To make these policies easier to identify, you can include the person's name; for example, |
Create an alert policy
Alert policies only apply to one account. If your New Relic organization has multiple accounts, you must create alert policies for each account.
- Go to one.newrelic.com > Alerts > Alert Policies.
- On the policy list page, click New alert policy.
- Type a meaningful name for the policy (maximum 64 characters).
- Select the issue preference.
- Select Create & close to create your policy or Set up notifications to connect your policy to a workflow. When there is a new issue or an update of an issue, you'll receive notifications in services such as PagerDuty or Slack.
You can continue from here to define the conditions and setup notifications using workflows. If you decide to continue later, select the policy name from the Alert policies index.
Change a policy name
For your convenience, we allow you to use the same name for different policies, conditions, and notification channels. If you want to use unique names, review or search the index before adding or changing a name.
To rename an existing policy:
- Go to one.newrelic.com > Alerts > Alert Policies, and then click on a policy in the list.
- Click the policy settings tab to edit it, type a meaningful name for the policy (maximum 64 characters), and click Save.
Alerts automatically updates any of the policy's conditions.
View existing policies
The policies index lists policies in alphabetical order. To view or search for existing policies:
- Go to one.newrelic.com > Alerts > Alert Policies.
- Use the search box, sort any column, or scroll the list.
- To view detailed information, click a policy name.
Tip
To view policy and condition information for a specific entity, select the Settings > Alert conditions page from the entity's product UI.
Policy maintenance quick reference
After you create a policy, you can:
- Add more conditions to the policy.
- Edit the conditions' names, targets, or thresholds.
- Disable conditions.
- Connect to notifications using workflows.
- Rename or delete the policy.
Here is a quick reference which also includes links to more detailed information and procedures for maintaining your policies.
