Use workloads

To view workloads, go to one.newrelic.com and find them on the Explorer. There are three main tabs (Health, Activity, and Owner) plus the header.

Health

The Health tab in a workload provides relevant status data that helps you operate the workload: It shows the global status of the workload, as well as the individual status of all the entities that make up the workload at each point in time. It looks like this:

It comprises the following:

1. The navigator view shows the entities that make up the workload, and provides controls to group and sort them. If you’ve used queries to dynamically select entities, the workload entities will change over time.
2. The workload status informs about how your workload is performing, based on the individual alerting status of the entities in your workload. With health over time you’ll see whether and how the workload status has changed in the past three hours.
3. If one or more entities are alerting, you’ll get a count of criticals and warnings and a summary of the open conditions, which will make it easier to identify and troubleshoot the most important issues.

Activity

The Activity tab shows performance data related to the entities in the workload, along with the events that could explain any changes in those time series. It looks like this:

Here are the most important sections:

1. Linked dashboards. You can add links to dashboards from your workload, and create pre-filtered, workload-relevant links to dashboards.
2. Golden metrics. These are charts with the most relevant metrics for each entity type, such as number of requests, response time, and error rate for an application. Explore the charts to detect correlations among different entities (for example, two applications) and different stack layers (for example, applications and hosts). The golden metrics that you see for each entity type on a workload can be customized either at the account or the workload level through the NerdGraph API.
3. Events timeline. This includes the start and end time of incidents and anomalies that refer to the workload entities. It also shows other event types that can explain a change in the status or performance of the workload, such as deployments and configuration changes.

You can control which golden metrics are used to visualize your workload entities by using the golden metrics API. To learn more, watch this short video (approx. 4 minutes).

Owner

The Owner tab gives you information about the team responsible for the workload. It looks like this:

It contains:

1. The team responsible for the workload. You can include more than one team.
2. The workload description. Share the mission of the workload, and the business logic it represents: Is it a web application? An API? A backend process? Fill in any details that are relevant to your team, or to other teams in your organization.
3. Contact information. From the drop-down menu, choose how your team prefers to be contacted.
4. Links to the most relevant resources to operate the workload. Here you can add links to runbooks, code repositories, productivity tools, or anything else related to the workload that you need at hand.

Header

The header contains the filter bar and the edition controls:

1. Filter bar. Use the advanced filtering options when you need to focus only on certain entities within the workload.
2. Edit workload. Define the entities that are part of the workload, and the accounts they’ll be fetched from.
3. Setup status. Configure how the global workload status will be determined, based on the workload entities health.
4. Summary page. See all the tags that have been added to the workload, as well as metadata such as the workload's identifier (GUID) and account.

You can create workloads that update dynamically by leveraging tags. To learn how, watch this short video (approx. 3 minutes).

Create a workload

A workload should contain the entities you and your team want to see. Your choice of entities depends on your organization structure and goals.

You can use the UIor the NerdGraph API to create a workload. Follow these steps to create a workload using the UI:

1. Go to one.newrelic.com and click on the Explorer, and then click + Create a workload.

2. Give the workload a name that will be meaningful for you and your team later.

3. From the Select an account dropdown, select the workload account you'd like to use.

4. Click Choose the scope accounts to check all of the accounts related to this workload.

5. Find and choose the entities that make up the workload. When you have the results you're looking for, you can add specific entities or add the query to dynamically update the entities in the workload.

   • You can search by entity type, tags, or attributes (like entity name, account ID, and AWS region).
   • Click + Add this query to create a list of dynamically updated entities for your workload. We recommend this if you want your workload to update its entities as your system changes.
   • Click + Add next to an entity to add it to your workload. This is a good choice if you know that the entities will stay useful even as your system changes.

6. You can add a combination of queries and specific entities to the workload, which combine according to the query logic.

7. Click Create a workload to save the workload. Once you've created the workload, you can edit it at any time

If your workload contains one or more dashboards, you can set filters on those dashboard links.

Below are more details about some aspects of how to define workloads:

Use tags to define the workload content

You can query and select workload entities using both tags and attributes. Therefore, to optimize your use of workloads, it helps to have a good entity-tagging strategy. We recommend reading the tagging documentation.

How the dynamic query logic works

You can add several individual entities and queries to define a workload.

• Queries can include multiple search terms. These are combined with an AND operator.
• Separate queries within a workload are combined with an OR operator.
• You can wrap strings between percent signs (%) to match exact substrings within a query. If you use substrings in entity names to categorize those entities (for example, <team>-<env>-<appName>), consider using tags complementarily, which are more powerful for filtering and grouping (for example, team:awesome, env:production).
• We recommend not to use percent signs (%) in dynamic queries that might return over 500 entities. This way, you get a more consistent experience in the user interface.

Add dashboards to workloads

If you have custom dashboards and you already know which data is relevant to your team for observing and operating their workloads, you can link those dashboards from your workload. You can also set filters on dashboards to scope them to a workload-specific context. When a user selects that dashboard from the workload, it opens with the filter already applied.

To add dashboards to a workload:

1. When creating or editing a workload, type Dashboard in the workload search bar to filter to dashboard entities.

2. Add other search terms to filter to specific dashboards.

3. Click Add.

   

   To filter a workload’s dashboard:

4. From a workload’s Overview page, select a dashboard.

5. Add search terms to filter the dashboard to a view that’s relevant for that workload.

6. Select Save filter for this workload.

Use the API

You can query, create, and update workloads with our NerdGraph API.