Decide when issues are created | New Relic Documentation

Important

In this document, we use the new terms "issue" and "incident." Please see this article for a full explanation of these new terms.

An issue is a collection of one or more incidents.

Issues determine when you are notified about incidents disrupting your business. These incidents occur when your given alert conditions (like CPU overage, synthetic monitoring crashes, or slow web app response times) are met.

Control which policy conditions create issues. This ensures that you are notified about important ongoing or recurring problems and not bombarded by unnecessary notifications.

Learn how to set issue preferences by your policy, condition, or condition and signal combination.

Critical and warning violations

Choose from two threshold types when a policy condition is met:

Critical (red)
Warning (yellow)

When a policy condition violates a critical threshold, an issue record can be created with detailed information to help you respond efficiently. The issue record will also include any warning incidents occurred after the opening critical threshold incident.

Notifications are sent to every notification channel on the policy as well as all destinations on any workflow that is properly configured when an issue opens, if and when an issue is acknowledged, and when an issue closes.

Issue preference options

Each issue preference option has its own advantages. You can select any preference for any policy.

Issue preference	Advantages
One issue per policy (default)	Only one issue will be open at a time for the entire policy. Fewest number of notifications Requires immediate action and closing the issues to be effective
One issue per condition	One issue will be open at a time for each condition in your policy. More notifications Useful for policies containing conditions that focus on entities that perform the same job; for example, hosts that all serve the same application(s)
One issue per incident	An issue will be created for every incident in your policy. The most notifications Useful if you need to be notified of every incident or if you have an external system where you want to send alert notifications

Issue preference

Advantages

One issue per policy (default)

Only one issue will be open at a time for the entire policy.

Fewest number of notifications
Requires immediate action and closing the issues to be effective

One issue per condition

One issue will be open at a time for each condition in your policy.

More notifications
Useful for policies containing conditions that focus on entities that perform the same job; for example, hosts that all serve the same application(s)

One issue per incident

An issue will be created for every incident in your policy.

The most notifications
Useful if you need to be notified of every incident or if you have an external system where you want to send alert notifications

Select your incident preference

By default, a single issue record will be created for each policy.

To change the issue preference for the selected policy:

In the one.newrelic.com top nav, click Alerts & AI, then click Alert conditions (Policies), and then (select a policy).
Click Issue creation preference, select your choice of available options, and then save.

Repeat these steps for each policy as needed.

one.newrelic.com > Alerts & AI > Alert conditions (Policies) > (select a policy): The selected policy page shows how alerts rolls up issues for alert notifications and UI details. (Default is By policy). To choose a different option for this policy, click Issue creation preference.

One issue per policy (default)

When you select the default (One issue per policy) as your issue preference, it will group all condition incidents into the same issue.

If additional conditions open incidents after the issue opens, the incidents are added to the same issue. Only one issue appears on your issues & activity page for the selected policy.

Choose the One issue per policy preference if your policy and its conditions have a focused scope (like monitoring one entity). Learn more about issue preference best practices.

One issue per condition

When you select One issue per condition as your issue preference, it will group all incidents by any target for a specific condition into separate issues.

Choose the One issue per condition option when you want an individual issue record to focus on a specific condition. If the policy has multiple conditions, separate issue records for each condition will appear on your issues & activity page.

If a target violates a condition for the alert policy, an incident will open and an issue record will be created.
If the same target violates another condition for the alert policy, another incident will open and another issue record will be created.
If additional targets open incidents on the same condition after the issue opens, these incidents will be added to the issue record already open for that condition.

Learn more about issue preference best practices.

One issue per incident

When you select One issue per incident as your issue preference, it will not group incidents at all. A new issue will be created for every incident that occurs in your policy.

The One issue per incident option is the most granular level for creating issue records. Choose this issue preference when you want to closely monitor anything that is occurring anywhere across your infrastructure.

Learn more about issue preference best practices.