New Relic today announced the general availability of a new platform capability that allows users to directly query entity and relationship data within New Relic Database (NRDB) using the familiar New Relic Query Language (NRQL). This powerful capability allows users to seamlessly join this vital information with their telemetry data, all in one place.
Customer Problem
Previously, entity, relationship, and telemetry data were fragmented across different data stores. This fragmentation made it challenging to perform even basic queries, requiring complex joins and increasing the time and effort needed to gain insights
Solution
This feature unifies data access by making entities and relationships available in NRDB for querying via NRQL. Entity and relationship data (Entity & Relationship event types) is stored in NRDB for a period of 24 hours. This enables users to easily correlate entities & relationships with telemetry data
Key Benefits
- Simplified Queries: Use NRQL to directly query entities and relationships, eliminating the need for complex joins across disparate data stores
- Unified Data Access: Access all relevant data—entities, relationships, and telemetry—within a single platform
- Create Advanced Scorecards with Direct Entity and Relationship Data:
- Enforce Tagging Compliance: Define Scorecard rules to easily identify entities (such as hosts, services, or applications) that are missing critical tags (e.g., team, environment, cost_center). A rule could check if all entities related to a specific team have the required compliance tags, flagging non-compliant entities directly on the scorecard.
- Monitor AWS Reliability and Configuration: Create scorecards that directly assess the configuration and reliability status of your AWS resources. This could include checking relationships between services and their underlying AWS infrastructure to ensure high availability best practices (e.g., ensuring critical services are deployed across multiple availability zones).
- Gauge Observability Maturity: Create Scorecards that track the presence and quality of key observability components related to specific entities, such as checking if all production services have associated alerts, log ingestion pipelines, and sufficient tracing coverage. This allows for clear, data-driven insights into your overall observability maturity and helps drive continuous improvement.
- Faster Insights: Quickly and efficiently retrieve the information needed to understand system behavior and troubleshoot issues
- Improved Correlation: Easily correlate entities and relationships with telemetry data to gain a comprehensive view of your environment
Use Cases
The following use cases illustrate how customers can leverage this feature
Use Case | |
Before this feature | After this feature |
Complex queries involving multiple data sources | FROM SystemSample JOIN (FROM Entity SELECT id,name WHERE type='INFRA-HOST' AND `tags.aws.awsRegion`='eu-central-1') ON entityGuid=id SELECT average(cpuPercent) FACET name |
Use Case Viewing Entity state at a specific point in time - Retrieve the state of a specific entity (Host or a container for example) at a past time | |
Before | After this feature |
Not possible | FROM Entity select * where id='<id>' since 7 hours ago until 6 hours ago limit 1 |
Use Case: | |
Before | After this feature |
Not possible | SELECT * FROM Entity WHERE `id`='<id>' SINCE 3 hours ago |
Use Case Finding applications related to hosts - Identify the applications running on specific hosts | |
Before | After this feature |
Difficult to correlate applications to hosts | FROM EntityRelationship SELECT sourceEntityGuid, targetEntityGuid, sourceEntityType, targetEntityType, relationshipType where (sourceEntityType like '%HOST%' and targetEntityType='APPLICATION') or (targetEntityType LIKE '%HOST%' and sourceEntityType='APPLICATION') |
Next steps
This feature is now generally available as part of New Relic Advanced Compute, giving you full access to our suite of intelligent observability innovations with usage-based pricing—no license swaps needed. You only pay for what you use, with built-in cost controls such as Feature Control Manager and Compute Budgets to manage observability spend, plus full platform access for all users. Learn more here.
Customers can begin querying entity and relationship data using the Entity event type
Learn more about these innovations on the E&R via NRQL, and Entities & Relationships Examples doc pages.
Don’t have an account? Request a demo or get started for free.
The views expressed on this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of New Relic. Any solutions offered by the author are environment-specific and not part of the commercial solutions or support offered by New Relic. Please join us exclusively at the Explorers Hub (discuss.newrelic.com) for questions and support related to this blog post. This blog may contain links to content on third-party sites. By providing such links, New Relic does not adopt, guarantee, approve or endorse the information, views or products available on such sites.
