New Relic Workflow Automation Is Now Generally Available

Today, we're announcing the general availability of New Relic Workflow Automation, a no-code and low-code automation layer built directly into New Relic that transforms observability data into executable actions. Workflow Automation actively responds to issues by executing remediation steps the moment problems are detected.

This is what Intelligent Observability looks like: an intelligent platform that monitors, detects, and fixes automatically. 

What is Workflow Automation?

Workflow Automation connects alerts, metrics, and system events in New Relic to automated actions across your infrastructure. When your application's error rate spikes after a deployment, a workflow can automatically roll it back. When CPU usage hits critical thresholds, workflows scale your infrastructure without waiting for manual intervention. When services fail, workflows restart them, clear caches, and notify your team—all in seconds.

You build workflows using a visual drag-and-drop interface or natural language prompts powered by New Relic AI. No scripting required. Pre-built templates get you started immediately with common scenarios like deployment rollback, EC2 auto-scaling, and incident enrichment.

Every workflow operates on live data from New Relic's unified telemetry platform (NRDB), which means automation decisions are based on complete system context across applications, infrastructure, logs, and user experience.

The Deployment Rollback Story

Let's walk through the use case that resonates most with engineering teams: automated deployment rollbacks.

Before Workflow Automation: Your team deploys a new release to production at 2 PM. Within minutes, error rates spike and response times degrade. Someone gets paged. They investigate logs, confirm the deployment caused it, and manually roll back. An hour later, systems return to normal, but the damage is done.

With Workflow Automation: Your team deploys a new release to production. Workflow Automation monitors your deployment with a marker in New Relic. An anomaly is detected where error rates spike above baseline. The workflow sends a message with diagnostic logs and posts to your team's Slack channel. Your engineer approves with a single Slack reaction. The workflow automatically rolls back to the previous version. Within minutes, systems return to normal.

The difference: MTTR reduced from hours to minutes. No war room. And the entire process is documented with full audit logs.

Real Impact: From Hours to Seconds

Organizations testing Workflow Automation are seeing measurable results:

• Reduction in MTTR by eliminating manual triage and remediation steps
• Reduction in operational toil, freeing engineers to focus on innovation
• Fewer customer-impacting incidents through automated issue resolution 

Here’s how teams are putting this into practice: 

A Fortune 100 restaurant company with mobile ordering across 100+ international markets automated their app release process with Workflow Automation. The solution enabled deployment teams to detect health issues during gradual rollouts and pause releases automatically, reducing manual triage time and improving customer experience metrics.

A Fortune 500 financial services company implemented Workflow Automation for EC2 instance management, automatically restarting instances when CPU metrics exceed thresholds. The team saw faster incident resolution and significantly reduced on-call burden.

What Makes Workflow Automation Different

No-code visual builder + YAML flexibility

Design workflows in our visual flowchart builder, then toggle to YAML to fine-tune the logic. Not everyone wants to code, not everyone wants to click. We give you both.

Native New Relic data integration

Your workflows run on the same unified data that powers your dashboards, alerts, and APM. No data silos, no separate instrumentation. Your observability data directly triggers automated actions.

Transparent, usage-based pricing

We count workflow execution steps. You see exactly what you're consuming. Scale automation without surprise bills.

Built-in governance and human oversight

Every workflow can include approval gates for critical decisions. Your team maintains control: workflows send a Slack message, wait for confirmation, then proceed. Full automation when you're ready, human-in-the-loop when you need it.

Launching with AWS AppConfig: Automatic Feature Flag Safety

We're kicking off general availability with a powerful example of what's possible: a new integration with AWS that enables automatic feature flag rollbacks through AWS AppConfig.

When you gradually release a feature flag change, or any configuration change, using AWS AppConfig (rolling out to 10%, then 20%, then 50% of users over several minutes or hours), New Relic Workflow Automation continuously monitors your application's health during this change. If error rates spike, latency increases, or any monitored metric alerts during rollout, the workflow instantly triggers AWS AppConfig to roll back the flag data to the last known good version. No manual intervention needed. This adds crucial safety guardrails to using feature flags and dynamic configuration.

"Many teams unfortunately can underestimate the danger of a feature flag or configuration change. Feature flag safety guardrails are critical for our customers who are releasing changes to production environments. By partnering with New Relic, we're giving AWS customers intelligent, automated rollback capabilities powered by comprehensive observability data. This integration demonstrates what's possible when you close the loop from detection to remediation."

 — Steve Rice, General Manager, AWS AppConfig

The AWS AppConfig integration is just the beginning. Workflow Automation supports a growing library of actions across AWS, Slack, Jira, PagerDuty, and any HTTP API.

Built for the Superhuman Era

Workflow Automation is a key component of New Relic's Intelligent Observability platform. This is observability evolved:

• Automated root cause analysis that instantly identifies why problems occurred
• Intelligent workflows that execute remediation without human intervention
• AI-powered creation using natural language to build automation for any engineer
• Complete system context from unified telemetry for smarter automation decisions

The gap between knowing something is broken and fixing it has always been the most expensive in operations. With Workflow Automation, that gap can be measured in seconds.