Proactively send alerts with Pulumi

By proactively monitoring your application, you can resolve issues before they affect your customers. Using New Relic with Pulumi, you can quickly create alerts that you share with your teams, ensuring that you are proactively monitoring your stack.

In this post, you’ll learn the basics of the following:

• What is Pulumi
• Pulumi versus Terraform

Then you can jump into a hands-on tutorial where you create alerts using Pulumi and New Relic. If you already know the basics of Pulumi and Terraform, you can jump right into Getting started with New Relic and Pulumi and make an alert using TypeScript and Node.js.

What is Pulumi?

Pulumi is an infrastructure as code framework for full-stack developers and cloud engineers who are interested in using their favorite programming language to manage the lifecycle of their cloud resources. In addition to being able to deploy your infrastructure and workloads to cloud providers, Pulumi supports observability as code. Using APIs from New Relic, you can embed your observability strategy into production and other environments using your favorite programming language.

That means you can also use Pulumi to create alerts.

Pulumi vs Terraform

If you’re already using Terraform, or you’re not sure about either Pulumi or Terraform, it’s helpful to know how they’re similar and different. They are both open source infrastructure-as-code tools, but they do have a few key differences.

Terraform is more mature and has a wider range of resources. However, with Terraform, you do need to learn HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), a vendor-specific language.

With Pulumi, you don’t use a vendor-specific language—you can use languages such as JavaScript, Python, Go, . NET, Java, and even markup languages like YAML. That makes Pulumi easier to use—and it’s constantly improving thanks to a growing community. If you want a more comprehensive breakdown of the differences between Pulumi and Terraform, check out this comparison.

Ultimately, the question is whether you prefer to use your favorite programming language to describe your infrastructure and cloud resources or a vendor-specific domain language. If you prefer to use your favorite programming language, go with Pulumi. If you don’t mind using HCL, then Terraform is also a good solution.

How to use Workflows to send Alerts using Pulumi

We have assembled a Getting Started Guide which shows you step-by-step how to use New Relic workflows to send alerts using Pulumi, TypeScript, and Node.js. In order to use the guide, you’ll just need to install the Pulumi CLI and have a recent version of Node.js installed.