Our New Relic query language, NRQL, has rate limits in place to ensure a high level of availability and reliability for all users.
Understand query limit violations
To see if you're hitting query-related limits, use the Limits UI.
You should rarely encounter rate limiting. Here are some guidelines to follow to ensure query limiting will be rare:
- Limit the number complex queries (for example, queries with
FACETorTIMESERIESclauses, or queries of over a million events) that run at the same time. - Limit the number of queries running concurrently over extended periods of time to a maximum of five, especially if they include complex queries.
NRQL query limits
There are a few different NRQL query limits:
- Number of queries an account can make in a given time range
- Number of data points an account can query (inspect) in a given time range
- How long a query can run for before being considered an error and stopping
Note that these limits apply only to customer-initiated NRQL queries, such as queries using the query builder, queries used in custom charts and dashboards, and NRQL queries done with our NerdGraph API. These limits don't apply to queries used in pre-built, "out-of-the-box" New Relic charts and dashboards.
Limits on number of queries
The limit on NRQL queries is 3,000 queries per account per minute. When this limit is exceeded, queries may be rejected until the number of queries sent per minute no longer exceeds the limit.
This limit is only applicable to the NRQL Query API requests and not the queries run from the query builder, New Relic UI, or custom dashboards. The limits that govern the rate of resource consumption for this category of queries run on the New Relic UI, query builder, or customer dashboards are only the Inspected count limits.
Limits on number of data points inspected
When you run a NRQL query, it displays the number of data points inspected, as shown below:
In this context, the "events" term is used in a general sense to refer to all NRQL-available data points that are inspected in a query.
Every New Relic account has limits on the total number of data points that can be inspected in a given time range. These limits vary depending on which data option you have:
What counts towards the inspected event limit?
The following are features and actions that count towards the inspected count limit and that are impacted when the limit is reached. When the count drops below the limit in the next time period, restrictions are removed.
- Loads of curated views initiated by a user (for example, when you load an UI page, the distributed tracing UI, a browser monitoring UI page, or any UI that returns data about your organization).
- Custom queries run by a New Relic user (NRQL or NerdGraph).
- Widgets on custom dashboards that run queries.
- Alert condition evaluation and notifications do not count towards the limit but the links to New Relic that are included in an alert notification do.
Query duration limit
The query duration limit is how long a NRQL query can run before it stops running. This limit depends on your data option:
- Original data option: 1 minute
- Data Plus:
- 2 minutes with regular NRQL query
- 10 minutes using asynchronous query