Announcing General Availability of New Relic Notebooks

Tell the Full Story of Your Data 

Today, we are thrilled to announce the General Availability of New Relic Notebooks—a data exploration capability designed to accelerate root cause analysis and bring order to the chaos of incident troubleshooting. Notebooks are an integral part of the core New Relic experience and are completely free for all Full Platform Users.

What are New Relic Notebooks?

New Relic Notebooks streamline data discovery by allowing you to create and share structured documents that combine live queries, visualizations, and rich markdown text. By providing a unified, multi-cell workspace, Notebooks empower you to drill down sequentially, compare live data side-by-side, and preserve the exact time-bound context of your investigations.

Why Notebooks?

If you are an SRE or DevOps engineer, this scenario probably sounds familiar: A complex incident triggers an alert at 2:00 AM. To find the root cause, you open your observability platform and start querying. One query leads to another, and soon you have dozens of different tabs open to compare data side-by-side. When you finally find the issue, you are forced to take manual screenshots and paste them into a static Confluence page or Slack thread just to share your findings with the team.

This disjointed workflow causes "tab fatigue," lost context between sessions, and makes knowledge sharing incredibly painful. The moment you paste a screenshot, the data is dead.

Key Features & Capabilities

• Multi-Cell Unified Canvas: Add queries and Markdown descriptions to your investigation without losing context. Combine telemetry and narrative in a single, data-driven document of your thinking process.
• Inline Query Comparison: Duplicate blocks, modify queries, or change visualization data types in one Notebook tab to easily compare results side-by-side.
• Dashboard-to-Notebook Drilldown: Seamlessly transition from a high-level view to deep technical analysis by clicking the "View query" link from any dashboard chart to instantly open a Notebook.
• Integrated Data Explorer: Quickly see attributes and values of queried metrics, and build queries with one click from the action menu.
• Persistent Workspaces & Direct Sharing: Save Notebooks as persistent documents and share your exact logical path across account members, or share a direct query link for broader access.
• Notebook-Level Variables:  Define reusable values like hostnames, service names, or environments, that can be referenced across all query and text blocks, so you can update one variable to instantly shift the entire investigation's focus.
• Bridge the Skills Gap with Natural Language to Query Translation
  You shouldn't need to be a syntax expert to get answers during an outage. Every query block now natively supports plain-English inputs. Simply type what you want—for example, “show me errors from the checkout service in the last hour”—and Notebooks will instantly generate the exact NRQL query, ready to run, tweak, or refine.
• Debug Faster with the Intelligent Query Formatter
  Complex queries with nested clauses can quickly become unreadable. Using the new Shift + Option + F shortcut, you can instantly standardize and beautify your NRQL syntax. The formatter isolates individual WHERE filters onto their own lines, making it incredibly simple to comment out specific parameters during a live debugging session to see exactly how they alter your results.
• Lock Down Sensitive Data via Fine-Grained Access Control (FGA)
  Notebooks frequently contain highly proprietary alert logic, system architecture details, and sensitive business metrics. With our new entity-level FGA model, you can ditch organization-wide access and secure your investigations using three distinct IAM roles:
• Notebook Owner: Full control over the document lifecycle and permission management.
• Notebook Editor: Collaborative read and write privileges for active co-investigators.
• Notebook Reader: Read-only access that allows teammates to safely execute queries and explore data interactively without risking accidental overrides to your cells.
• Launch Instantly with Favorite Notebooks
  Power users rely on a specific set of recurring playbooks, post-mortems, and ID lookup utilities. To remove friction, starting a notebook automatically pins it to your empty-state launchpad screen. The next time you open a blank notebook tab, your most important operational runbooks are accessible in a single click.

Transforming Your Workflows

New Relic Notebooks are built from the ground up for deep technical troubleshooting. Here is how they transform your core engineering practices:

1. Root-Cause Analysis Drill-Down

Stop juggling browser tabs. Use a Notebook to build a multi-cell logical sequence. Establish a high-level query in cell one, filter by service in cell two, and compare the anomalous latency against your baseline in cell three—finding the root cause efficiently without losing your place.

2. Living Post-Incident Reviews (Post-Mortems)

Instead of gathering stale screenshots for a static wiki page, write your post-mortem narrative directly in a Notebook. Embed the exact queries and visualizations used during the incident, pinned precisely to the outage window. Stakeholders can read the narrative and interact with the live data simultaneously.

3. Dynamic Runbooks for On-Call Teams

Turn one-off investigations into reusable assets. Create dynamic runbooks in Notebooks and link them directly to alert conditions. When a junior on-call engineer is paged, they can click the link to open a Notebook pre-populated with the exact queries needed, ready to execute against current telemetry. By leveraging intelligent variables, you can pipe results from one query into another, making your runbooks even more dynamic and automated.

Get Started Today

It's time to shift your data exploration from a transient, chaotic activity to a persistent, collaborative, and narrative-driven analytical process. Tell the full story of your data with connected investigations.

Log in to your New Relic account today to create your first Notebook!

• Full Platform Users have immediate, complete free access to the Notebooks interface, query capabilities, and entity-saving features. To help teams adjust comfortably from legacy workflows, Full Platform Users will see a functional toggle menu for the first 30 days to easily switch between the Notebook canvas and the legacy single-query view.
• Core & Basic Users do not have access to Notebooks. When interacting with the Notebooks list or clicking a shared link from a colleague, these users will encounter an automatic upgrade communication detailing how to seamlessly transition to a Full Platform license.