Populate your alert configurations with NerdGraph

With a quickstart, you let your users quickly install dashboards, alerts, and other resources. Here, you learn how to use New Relic's GraphQL API, NerdGraph, to query your existing alert conditions and configure them in your quickstart.

Important

This guide assumes you already have alerts in your New Relic account and a quickstart that you want to add those alerts to. If you don't already have a quickstart, follow our lab to learn how to build one.

Set up your quickstart's alerts directory

This guide assumes you have a quickstart. However, your quickstart may or may not already have alerts. Either way, to add alerts to your quickstart, you need an alerts directory. If your quickstart already has one, you can skip this section.

The _template directory of New Relic quickstarts contains an alerts template folder. Copy this folder to your quickstart. From here, you use the YAML file that corresponds to the alert condition type you want to add to your quickstart.

Once your quickstart is ready to add alerts, you need to look up your alert condition's ID.

Look up your alert's condition ID

To populate your alert configurations with NerdGraph, you first need to look up its identifier.

Step 1 of 5

From your New Relic homepage, go to Alerts & AI.

Alerts & AI

Step 2 of 5

Click Policies in left hand navigation.

Policies

Step 3 of 5

Choose your policy from the list.

choose your policy

Step 4 of 5

Here, you see the list of conditions. Choose the condition that you want to query.

alert condition

Step 5 of 5

On the Next page, you see ID, Account, and Policy associated with the condition. Copy the ID.

get alert condition id

With this identifier, you can now query your alert conditions and use the response to build out alert resources in your quickstart.

Query alert conditions in NerdGraph

There are three types of alerts you can have in New Relic:

Jump to the appropriate section for the kind of alert you want to add to your quickstart.

Query your static alert condition

Step 1 of 4

Open the NerdGraph API explorer and select your key from the dropdown menu.

graphiql interface

Step 2 of 4

Copy the following GraphQL query and paste it in the center pane of the explorer.

{
  actor {
    account(id: REPLACE_ACCOUNT_ID) {
      alerts {
        nrqlCondition(id: REPLACE_CONDITION_ID) {
          ... on AlertsNrqlStaticCondition {
            id
            name
            type
            nrql {
              query
            }
            valueFunction
            terms {
              operator
              priority
              threshold
              thresholdDuration
              thresholdOccurrences
            }
            violationTimeLimitSeconds
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Here, you query AlertsNrqlStaticCondition for your condition's ID, name, query and more. These are the required fields you need to create the same alert in your quickstart.

Important

Make sure you replace your account ID and condition ID in the above query.

Step 3 of 4

Execute the query to get a JSON representation of the specified condition.

static alert query

Next, use this response to add a static alert to your quickstart.

Tip

Notice the checkboxes in the left-hand pane get checked when you paste the query in the explorer. This query returns the fields required to add alert to the quickstart. If you've set custom fields or want to query more information, feel free to either edit the query in the center pane of the explorer or check the corresponding box in the left-hand pane.

Step 4 of 4

Populate static-alert.yml from your alerts quickstart folder with the data returned from your query. Given the example response from the last step, our file looks like:

---


# Name of the alert
name: Static Condition


# Description and details
details: |+
  This alert is triggered whenever the host count is < 2.


# Type of alert
type: STATIC


# NRQL query
nrql:
  query: "SELECT uniqueCount(host) FROM Transaction"


# Function used to aggregate the NRQL query value(s) for comparison to the terms.threshold (Default: SINGLE_VALUE)
valueFunction: SINGLE_VALUE


# List of Critical and Warning thresholds for the condition
terms:
- priority: CRITICAL
  # Operator used to compare against the threshold.
  operator: BELOW
  # Value that triggers a violation
  threshold: 2
  # Time in seconds; 120 - 3600
  thresholdDuration: 300
  # How many data points must be in violation for the duration
  thresholdOccurrences: AT_LEAST_ONCE


# Duration after which a violation automatically closes
# Time in seconds; 300 - 2592000 (Default: 86400 [1 day])
violationTimeLimitSeconds: 259200

Here, you added a static alert to your quickstart. If it's helpful, you can rename this file to whatever you want.

Query your baseline alert condition

Step 1 of 4

Open the NerdGraph API explorer and select your key from the dropdown menu.

graphiql interface

Step 2 of 4

Copy the following GraphQL query and paste it in the center pane of the explorer.

{
  actor {
    account(id: REPLACE_ACCOUNT_ID) {
      alerts {
        nrqlCondition(id: REPLACE_CONDITION_ID) {
          ... on AlertsNrqlBaselineCondition {
            id
            name
            nrql {
              query
            }
            baselineDirection
            terms {
              priority
              threshold
              thresholdDuration
              thresholdOccurrences
            }
            violationTimeLimitSeconds
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Here, you query AlertsNrqlBaselineCondition for your condition's name, query, baselineDirection, and other fields required to add the condition to your quickstart.

Important

Make sure you replace your account ID and condition ID in the above query.

Step 3 of 4

Execute the query to get the configuration data of your alert.

baseline alert query response

Next, use this response to add baseline alert to your quickstart.

Tip

Notice the checkboxes in the left-hand pane get checked when you paste the query in the explorer. This query returns the fields required to add alert to the quickstart. If you've set custom fields or want to query more information, feel free to either edit the query in the center pane of the explorer or check the corresponding box in the left-hand pane.

Step 4 of 4

Populate baseline-alert.yml from your alerts quickstart folder with the data returned from your query. Given the example response from the last step, our file looks like:

---


# Name of the alert
name: Baseline Condition


# Description and details
details: |+
  This alert is triggered whenever the average Transaction duration deviates 2 standard deviations from the normal.


# Type of alert
type: BASELINE


# NRQL query
nrql:
  # Baseline alerts can use an optional FACET
  query: "SELECT average(duration) FROM Transaction"


# Direction in which baseline is set (Default: LOWER_ONLY)
baselineDirection: UPPER_ONLY


# List of Critical and Warning thresholds for the condition
terms:
- priority: CRITICAL
  # Value that triggers a violation
  threshold: 2
  # Time in seconds; 120 - 3600, must be a multiple of 60 for Baseline conditions
  thresholdDuration: 180
  # How many data points must be in violation for the duration
  thresholdOccurrences: ALL


# Duration after which a violation automatically closes
# Time in seconds; 300 - 2592000 (Default: 86400 [1 day])
violationTimeLimitSeconds: 259200

Here, you added a baseline alert to your quickstart. If it's helpful, you can rename this file to whatever you want.

Summary

In this guide, you learned how to query your existing alert conditions using NerdGraph and how to use the query's JSON response to populate corresponding alert files in quickstart. Read our documentation to learn more about: