Collaborate and fix errors quickly with Errors Inbox and workloads

When your web application has an outage or an error, who is responsible for finding and fixing the issue? You might have front-end engineers fixing errors in the UI and back-end engineers debugging APIs, but what happens when the source of the issue isn't clear?

Many issues fall in the fuzzy boundary between teams where the exact cause is unknown and neither team takes the lead on solving the problem. These issues often fall through the cracks, especially if they aren’t causing immediate problems, only to lead to yet more technical debt for your teams to fix later.

You can combine workloads with New Relic Errors Inbox in New Relic One to help your teams collaborate across those fuzzy boundaries and quickly fix issues. Workloads allow you to group related apps and services so that teams can monitor the applications and services they are responsible for. New Relic Errors Inbox groups related errors together to detect, triage, and resolve errors. Let's take a look at how you can set up New Relic Errors Inbox with workloads.

Gaining visibility to a web app using workloads

With workloads you can create a group of specific apps and services you are monitoring. In New Relic One, these individual apps and services are called entities. Entities are the individual components that power your customer-facing application, either web or mobile. For example, if you have a front-end development team that is responsible for your company’s eCommerce site, you create a workload that encompasses not just your website and web app, but all of the back-end services that are needed to support the application.

Even if your services are constantly changing, tags ensure that your workloads automatically update to include the relevant entities. The following image shows an example of tags.

How to set up a workload

Before you set up a workload, your application needs to be instrumented. After your observability data is in New Relic, you’re ready to set up workloads to group your services.

1. Navigate to Workload views and select + Create a workload.

2. Give your workload a descriptive name and then choose the entities you want to add to the workload. This can be done by entity type (such as Browser Applications), tag, or even other workloads. You can also add specific entities to your workload. After you have selected your entities, select Create a workload.

3. Monitor the health of your service at a glance. The Workload status section on the right lets you know which specific entities are experiencing a disruption. You can also monitor your workload in the Explorer view.

Troubleshoot errors as a team with Errors Inbox

After you have instrumented your application, created a workload, and provided access to the cross-functional team, you’re ready to use New Relic Errors Inbox.

Go directly to Errors Inbox from the workload by selecting the Go to errors inbox link in the Errors module on the right of the screen.

You can also navigate to Errors Inbox by selecting the menu item. Go back to the related workload by selecting View workload.

When errors are detected in APM, browser, mobile, or serverless data, Errors Inbox groups those errors on a single screen and filters them by the highest number of occurrences. You may discover errors you didn’t realize were occurring or gain insight into the root cause of an error so you can quickly assign it to the right team.

Selecting an error group takes you to the details so you can view the stack trace, investigate specific attributes, and make comments. 

Save error context over time and collaborate with teammates with discussions

Formerly called comments, the Discussions tab has added functionality for more detailed and organized collaboration. With discussions, you get the following:
 

1. Threaded conversations: Reply directly to top-level comments to create threads so you can have discussions about any errors.

2. Comment deletion: Delete comments. The content of the post will be removed, but a comment deleted message will remain.
3. Markdown support: Add styling and links to your comments in Markdown.

4. Markdown preview: You can preview your comment by selecting the M icon.

5. Saved error context. Comments persist over time, so if an error is reopened, future collaborators can quickly understand the context of the previous fix.

Collaborating with team members in Slack

You can set up Slack notifications so that error messages related to specific groups are automatically sent to a team Slack channel for triaging. You can customize these notifications so that teams only receive notifications related to error groups that are relevant to their work.

This makes it easy to collaborate with teams on Slack, including anyone that doesn't have access to New Relic. Check out Integrate Slack and APM with New Relic Errors Inbox for more details about the Slack integration.