Workload helps you organize, monitor, and troubleshoot your entire technology stack by grouping related entities into business-relevant units. Instead of tracking dozens of services, hosts, and applications separately, workload gives you a unified view of everything that powers a specific business function, team, or customer experience.
Why use workload?
Modern applications span multiple services, hosts, databases, and third-party dependencies. Workload solves the challenge of monitoring complex, distributed systems by:
- Simplifying observability: View health and performance across your entire stack in one place
- Accelerating troubleshooting: Quickly identify which components are causing issues
- Improving collaboration: Share system status with teams without requiring deep technical knowledge
- Aligning to business outcomes: Group entities by business function, customer journey, or team responsibility
one.newrelic.com > All capabilities > Workloads: Workload provides a unified view of system health across all your monitored entities.
What you can include in workload
Both workload types can include:
- Any New Relic-monitored entity (applications, services, hosts, databases, etc.)
- Dashboards
- Other workloads (useful for complex team structures)
Standard workloads let you manually select these entities or define dynamic queries.
Intelligent workloads automatically include all entities participating in the selected transaction flow.
Types of workload
New Relic offers two types of workload, each designed for different use cases:
You manually define which entities belong to the workload using queries, tags, or by selecting specific entities. Membership updates when your queries match new entities or you manually add/remove them.
Key capabilities
Entity discovery: Manual or tag-based queries
Membership updates: When queries match new entities or manual changes
Setup complexity: Simple - select entities or write queries
Health status: Configurable rules
Alerting: On workload status
Important
This feature is currently in public preview.
Automatically discovers and tracks entities based on distributed traces from Transaction 360. Membership updates every 5 minutes as your system evolves, with AI insights and custom KPIs available.
Key capabilities
Entity discovery: Automatic via Transaction 360
Membership updates: Every 5 minutes automatically
Setup complexity: Requires Transaction 360 and distributed tracing
AI insights: Provides performance analysis and investigation for the workloads
Custom KPIs: Define and track custom KPIs based on your unique business needs
Health status: Configurable rules
Alerting: On workload status, KPIs, and Workload Golden Metrics
Requirements
To use Intelligent workload, you need:
Transaction 360: Must be enabled with distributed tracing in your New Relic account
Trace data: Recent distributed traces for the transactions you want to monitor
Permissions: Ability to create and manage workloads in your account
Limitations
AWS infrastructure only: Not available in Azure environments; not available to FedRAMP customers due to AI processing requirements for AI insights
When to use Intelligent workload
Intelligent workload is ideal for:
Critical business transactions with dynamic architectures
Complex dependencies where entity participation changes frequently
Scenarios requiring business outcome tracking with custom KPIs
Teams needing AI-powered insights for faster troubleshooting
Conseil
You can use both types! Many organizations use Standard workload for infrastructure and Intelligent workload for critical business transactions.