Skip to main content
New Relic is one connection that covers logs, dimensional metrics, and APM (traces and spans), all queried with NRQL over New Relic’s data store. Investigations query it to see what your services were doing around the time of an incident: the log lines, the metric that moved, and the slow or failing span behind a bad request.
You connect New Relic directly, with a User key, region, and account ID. Investigations discover New Relic logs, metrics, and APM automatically, and you choose which of them to enable.

What we support

Connecting New Relic gives investigations three capabilities, each of which you can enable independently, plus your dashboards:

Logs

Investigations search your New Relic logs with NRQL to read what a service was logging at the time of an incident. The same query language turns logs into time-series, so an error rate climbing or a request volume dropping away shows up as a graph even where you never set up a dedicated metric for it.

Metrics

Investigations query your dimensional metrics and graph them for the incident’s time window, so a resource spike, a latency change, or a growing error count shows up against the period that matters.

APM

Investigations use your traces and spans in three ways: searching for the spans behind a problem (a slow endpoint, a failing dependency, a particular service), pulling a specific trace by ID to see the full span tree and where it broke, and aggregating spans into throughput, latency, and error-rate signals for a service.

Dashboards

Your dashboards are read for the NRQL behind their widgets, so investigations learn the event types, attributes, and filters your team already queries. Investigations learn the structure of your New Relic data automatically: your log attributes, metric names, and the services your spans belong to. How that works is covered in How telemetry works.

Connecting New Relic

You connect New Relic directly. There’s no provider in front of it. What you’ll need:
  • A New Relic User key (starts NRAK-). We recommend creating one for a dedicated integration user with a read-only role, under API keys in New Relic.
  • Your account’s region: US or EU, matching whichever New Relic domain you log in to (one.newrelic.com or one.eu.newrelic.com). New Relic rejects a key used against the wrong region.
  • Your account ID, the numeric ID of the account you want investigations to query.
  1. From the Investigations settings, add a telemetry data source and choose New Relic.
  2. Enter your User key, region, and account ID, then test the connection. We check the key authenticates and that it can reach the account you specified.
  3. Once connected, investigations discover New Relic logs, metrics, and APM. Each arrives disabled by default, so review them and enable the ones your team uses.
Your dashboards are available to connect as soon as New Relic is connected.

Best practices

  • Use a dedicated integration user for the User key, with a read-only role, so investigations can’t do anything New Relic itself wouldn’t allow a viewer to do.
  • Connect the dashboards your team relies on. Investigations learn your real query patterns from them, which makes New Relic queries more accurate. We’ll do best-effort dashboard discovery ourselves, but you can specify which ones your team uses the most.

Telemetry overview

How data sources and capabilities fit together.

How telemetry works

Routing, query planning, guidance, and memory.