New Relic Workflow Automation turns alerts into auto-remediation
Alert fatigue is a real tax on small engineering teams. Your monitoring stack tells you something is broken, but a human still has to wake up, diagnose the issue, and execute a fix. New Relic reports that gap can take 30 minutes or more even when you have the right tools in place.
New Relic Workflow Automation is designed to close that gap. It’s a no-code and low-code orchestration layer built directly into New Relic that connects observability data to executable remediation steps.
What it actually does
Instead of stopping at detection and sending you a notification, Workflow Automation can take action. When an alert fires because your error rate spikes after a deployment, a workflow can automatically roll back to the previous version. When CPU usage on your VMs hits 90 percent, a workflow can scale them up without waiting for a person to respond. When a service goes down, a workflow can restart it, clear related caches, and post a notification to Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, or PagerDuty.
For higher-stakes changes, you can insert an approval step. The workflow posts the proposed action to Slack or Microsoft Teams, waits for a team member to approve or reject it, then proceeds or aborts accordingly.
How it’s built
Four components make up the system:
- Action Catalog: pre-built integrations for AWS services (EC2, Lambda, Systems Manager), notification tools, and New Relic’s own NRQL and NerdGraph query actions.
- Templates: ready-to-deploy workflows for common scenarios including deployment monitoring, incident enrichment, and infrastructure management.
- Control logic: conditional branching, loops, and wait states for complex operational sequences.
- Human-in-the-loop steps: approval gates that pause execution and wait for human confirmation before proceeding with critical changes.
Workflows are defined in YAML or built visually through a drag-and-drop interface. Authentication to external systems uses cloud-native identity methods like IAM roles or API keys, with permissions scoped to only what the workflow needs.
The rollback use case
New Relic highlights deployment rollback as a primary use case. The claim is that manual rollback processes typically take 30 minutes or more from detection to resolution. Workflow Automation reduces that to minutes by monitoring deployment health continuously and triggering the rollback the moment a problem is detected.
To get started, navigate to New Relic > All Capabilities > Workflow Automation in your account. Full setup documentation is available at docs.newrelic.com.
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