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Decide when incidents are created

An incident is a collection of one or more violations.

Incidents determine when you are notified about violations disrupting your business. These violations 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 incidents. This ensures that you are notified about important ongoing or recurring issues and not bombarded by unnecessary notifications.

Learn how to set incident 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 incident record can be created with detailed information to help you respond efficiently. The incident record will also include any warning violations occurred after the opening critical threshold violation.

Notifications are sent to every notification channel on the policy when an incident opens, if and when an incident is acknowledged, and when an incident closes.

Incident preference options

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

Incident preference

Advantages

By policy (default)

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

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

By condition

One incident 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)

By condition and signal

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

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

Select your incident preference

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

To change the incident preference for the selected policy:

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

Repeat these steps for each policy as needed.

A screenshot showing where the incident preference button is inside the alerts user interface.A screenshot showing how to change your incident preferences on the alerts user interface.

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

By policy (default)

A diagram showing how the By policy incident preference works

When you select the default (By policy) as your incident preference, it will group all condition violations into the same incident.

If additional conditions are violated after the incident opens, the violations are added to the same incident. Only one incident appears on your Incidents indexes for the selected policy.

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

By condition

A diagram showing how the By condition incident preference works

When you select By condition as your incident preference, it will group all violations by any target for a specific condition into separate incidents.

Choose the By condition option when you want an individual incident record to focus on a specific condition. If the policy has multiple conditions, separate incident records for each condition will appear on your incidents indexes.

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

Learn more about incident preference best practices.

By condition and signal

Alert policy incident preferences

When you select By condition and signal as your incident preference, it will not group violations at all. A new incident will be created for every violation that occurs in your policy.

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

Learn more about incident preference best practices.

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