Observability-As-Code: Introducing the New Relic Artifact Terraform Controller

Written by Oscar Lopez, SRE Engineer - 29th Aug, 2024

Effective observability is paramount; it’s essential for organizations to gain deep insights into their systems’ performance, identify potential issues, and optimize operations.

However, establishing a robust observability framework can be a daunting task, often involving the creation and management of numerous New Relic artifacts.

To streamline this process and ensure consistency for alerts, visualizations and service level artifacts across all instrumented applications, we’ve developed the Terraform Controller. This powerful solution automates the deployment of standardized New Relic artifacts, saving teams valuable time and effort.

By leveraging Terraform, a popular Infrastructure-as-Code tool, and its official New Relic provider, the Controller enables you to define and manage your New Relic Observability standard artifacts as code. This approach promotes reproducibility, collaboration, and version control. With pre-built templates for alerts, service levels, and dashboards, the Controller accelerates time-to-value, allowing teams to focus on gaining insights rather than configuring tools.

Key benefits of the Terraform Controller include:

Standardization: Enforces consistent artifact naming and tagging conventions across applications.
Efficiency: Reduces artifact creation time with ready-to-use templates.
Flexibility: Offers customizable Terraform code for tailoring to specific needs.
Comprehensiveness: Provides a rich set of pre-defined dashboards and alerts that can be easily fine-tuned (where required).

The Controller is designed to deploy a variety of New Relic artifacts, including incident and information alert policies, service levels, and comprehensive dashboards covering various aspects of application performance. By applying standardized tags to workloads, the Controller can also enable accurate data correlation and analysis.

There’s no better time to start confidently scaling your observability practices and reducing manual overhead without sacrificing quality or consistency.