Workload status views and notifications

The workload status, which is derived from the alerting status of the entities in your workload, informs you about how your workload is behaving.

Why it matters

Workload status:

• Is a quick indicator of how your system is doing, and tells you if you need to take action on any of your workloads in just a glance.
• Adapts to your needs and to how important each entity is.
• Allows you to share the status of your workloads. Other teams that depend on your services or infrastructure can learn the status of the workload without them needing to understand your system’s architecture details, or look at custom dashboards.

Get started with workload status

Our platform provides a status value for all entities, which is based on the results of New Relic alerts. You can check the color-coded alert status for each entity on the New Relic Explorer, or consume the alert status value through the API. For example, you may see a red alert status indicating that a critical violation is in progress.

With Workloads you can group entities that are part of a complex system and obtain a single, global value that summarizes the status of all the entities in your workload. Thus, you can quickly detect when the workload stops being operational, or anticipate any potential incident or loss of quality of service.

Obtain your workload status

A workload can have one of the following status values:

• Operational: The workload is working fine.
• Degraded: The workload is showing some degradation in performance or errors, but it’s still providing an acceptable level of service, and you don’t need to take any urgent action.
• Critical or Disrupted: The workload is not providing an acceptable level of service, and you need to take urgent action.
• Unknown: You haven’t configured how to calculate workload status, or there aren’t any alert conditions set up that can determine the status of the workload entities.

To learn how to define or edit the workload status, refer to Workload status configuration.

Save views with sets of workloads

If you usually need to see the status of a certain group of workloads, you can save views that contain only those workloads. The tile view mode helps you quickly find your workloads and see their status at a glance.

To create a view, follow these steps:

1. Go to one.newrelic.com and click on More > Workload views.
2. Click on Add view.
3. Give the view a meaningful name (such as the name of a team or business unit), and select an account to associate the view with.
4. Select the workloads you want to include in the view, by their name or tags.
5. Save the new view.

Status views are most useful for teams that are accountable for more than one workload, support roles, and business unit managers.

Get notified when the workload status changes

You may need to follow the status of a workload, either because it represents the services your team is accountable for, or because your own services depend on that workload, which is managed by another team.

The status of all workloads is calculated regularly and the result is stored in NRDB through a WorkloadStatus event. This allows you to set up an alert condition to notify you whenever the Workload goes into a Disrupted or Degraded status.

To set up the alert condition follow these steps:

1. Go to one.newrelic.com and select Alerts & AI. Select the policy where you want to add the new alert condition, or create a new policy with the appropriate notification channel. Then click on Create a condition.

2. Where prompted to Select a product, click NRQL.

3. Add the following NRQL query:

   SELECT latest(statusValueCode) FROM WorkloadStatus WHERE workloadGuid = '<GUID>' FACET workloadGuid as 'entity.guid', entity.name

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4. • You can obtain the workload GUID by clicking on the See metadata and manage tags on the workload UI.
   • Write the WHERE clause so the alert condition applies to just one workload (as in the example) or more than one. Or remove the WHERE clause if you want the alert condition to apply to all the workloads on the account.
   • By adding the FACET you can use these fields on the alert description, as explained below.

5. Set one of the following static thresholds:

   • (Recommended) Critical when the query returns a value equal to 3 for at least 1 minute, if you want to be notified when the workload status is disrupted.
   • Critical when the query returns a value equal to 2 for at least 1 minute, if you want to be notified when the workload status is degraded.
   • Remember that a warning threshold doesn't generate an incident or send a notification. As a result, you need to create two alert conditions with a critical threshold (as explained above) if you want to be notified of any status change.

6. Complete the alert condition:

   • Set a violation time limit, to automatically force-close a long-lasting violation after the selected amount of time you select.
   • Choose to fill data gaps with last known value.

7. Optionally, you can also add a custom violation description that includes the workload name and permanent link to the UI in the alert notification:

   Workload: {{tag.entity.name}}
   Direct link: https://one.newrelic.com/redirect/entity/{{tag.entity.guid}}

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