The New Relic Event API is one way to report custom events to New Relic. The Event API lets you send custom event data to your New Relic account with a POST command. These events are then queryable and chartable using NRQL.
Want to try out our Event API? Create a New Relic account for free! No credit card required.
Related content:
- Learn about all options for reporting custom events.
- For details about how event data is retained, see Event data retention.
- For how to add attributes to existing events, see Add custom attributes.
- Check out New Relic University’s tutorial Adding custom events with the Event API (aka the Insights API). Or, go directly to the full online course Custom data.
Requirements
For Event API limits and restricted attributes, see Limits.
Ensure outbound connectivity on TCP port 443 is allowed to the CIDR range that matches your region.
The preferred configuration method is to use the DNS name insights-collector.newrelic.com
or insights-collector.eu01.nr-data.net
.
Basic workflow
The Event API is an asynchronous endpoint. This allows you to send a very large volume of POSTS, reliably, with very low response latency.
Tip
If your account hosts data in the EU data center, ensure you are using the proper API endpoints for EU region accounts.
To send a custom event to a New Relic account:
- Get a license key for the account you want to report data to.
- Before creating custom events or attributes, review New Relic's list of reserved terms used by NRQL.
- Generate JSON for the event by instrumenting your application, querying an API, or some other method.
- Submit a compressed JSON payload (for example,
gzip
ordeflate
) to the HTTPS endpoint using curl in a POST request. - Recommendation: Set up NRQL alert conditions to notify you when parsing errors occur.
This method will send the events directly into your account, where they will be accessible from any NRQL interface or with the Query API.
The Event API limits the size, rate, and characters allowed in custom events. Also, like other events available in NRQL, custom events cannot be updated or deleted after they are created. If you have problems with your custom event, follow the troubleshooting procedures or create a new custom event.
Get the license key
You'll need a license key. License keys are associated with an account, not a specific user. This means that anyone in the account with access to that key can use it.
You can submit multiple event types to the same account with the same license key. However, to help ensure security, we recommend that you use different keys for different applications or data sources.
Alternatively, you can use an Insights insert keyfor this API, but we recommend using a license key.
Format the JSON
The Event API accepts specific formats for attributes included in the payload. Only float or string values are allowed.
Submit the custom event
Data submitted to the Event API uses a compressed JSON format in a simple HTTPS POST request. This example uses gzip
, but you can also use deflate
.
Important
Always use compression with every payload. This allows you to send more data, and it saves resources during parsing.
Before generating your HTTP request, make sure it is properly formatted, including:
- The
Api-Key
contains the correct license key. - The
Content-Type
isapplication/json
. - The request uses POST only. The API does not accept PUT and GET requests.
The API supports HTTP/1.1 persistent connections. This is helpful to manage client-side performance under heavy event loads.
Verify or troubleshoot request response
The Event API follows a two-step process to process requests:
- The Event API synchronously acknowledges or rejects the request based on validation of the headers and payload size.
- The Event API asynchronously parses the payload after a successful HTTP response is provided to the client. This may generate an error due to missing or malformed data. These are classified as submission errors or parsing errors.
All successful submissions receive a 200
response, regardless of any data errors that may exist within the payload. The response includes a uuid
, which is a unique ID created for each request. The uuid
also appears in any error events created for the request.
Other potential issues:
- 10-second timeout: API calls exceeding 10 seconds will time out.
- Large payloads: Payloads exceeding 100 KB may see increased response times.
Recommendation: In addition to checking for a success message, create a NRQL query of your data to verify it's available.
Query and alert with NrIntegrationError
The NrIntegrationError
event allows you to query and set alerts on custom data being sent to your New Relic account. Recommendation: To get alerts for parsing errors, create a NRQL alert condition for NrIntegrationError
. Use this example NRQL query:
SELECT message FROM NrIntegrationError WHERE newRelicFeature = 'Event API' AND category = 'EventApiException'
NrIntegrationError attributes | Troubleshooting |
---|---|
| The timestamp when the request was received. The Do not use a decimal for the timestamp. If a decimal is used, the attribute will default to the timestamp when the custom event was created. |
| The name of the feature experiencing errors. For all custom event parsing errors, this will be |
| The first six characters of the license key used for the request that generated an error. |
| The |
| The category of the error. For custom events, this is |
| Contents of the error message. |
| The error's name. For custom events, this is always |
| One of the event types that generated the error, when available. |
Find your data
To find data sent via the Event API (and from integrations that use this API), you can query it. For example, to query a custom event using NRQL, you would run:
SELECT * FROM YOUR_CUSTOM_EVENT
For more on how to query, see Query data.
Limit on HTTP requests
The Event API has a rate limit of 100,000 HTTP requests (POSTs) per minute, per account. (Note that this is not a limit on the number of events per minute; only on the number of POSTs per minute.)
This limit helps ensure that large traffic spikes in accounts across our multi-tenant platform do not negatively affect how the service performs for you.
If your API usage exceeds 100k POSTs in a 1-minute window, we will reject subsequent API requests with a 429 response code for the remainder of the 1-minute window. At the end of the 1-minute window, the counter will be reset and allow traffic to resume.
This limit is intended to be an upper threshold that you shouldn't hit under normal scenarios. If you have a high number of 429 responses, consider using the API less. If you are expecting a higher-than-normal activity level in the near future and want to prepare for that, contact technical support.