New Relic’s native Slack integration pushes monitoring alerts directly to your Slack channels in real time, so your team gets notified instantly when infrastructure, application, or performance issues occur.
Overview
New Relic is a comprehensive application performance monitoring (APM) and infrastructure monitoring platform that tracks the health and behavior of your applications, servers, and cloud infrastructure. Slack is a team communication hub where conversations, notifications, and workflows happen. When you connect them, New Relic alerts bypass email and go straight to Slack—meaning your ops team and developers see critical issues in the channel where they’re already working, without switching tools.
This integration is particularly valuable for teams that rely on Slack for incident response and want to reduce alert fatigue by centralizing notifications in channels dedicated to specific systems or services.
How the Integration Works
- Alert Routing: New Relic monitors your applications and infrastructure continuously. When a condition threshold is breached (e.g., CPU usage exceeds 80% or error rate spikes), New Relic triggers an alert notification.
- Slack Channel Delivery: The native integration sends that alert to a designated Slack channel in real time. You configure which New Relic conditions map to which Slack channels, allowing you to route critical infrastructure alerts to an ops channel and application errors to a dev channel.
- Rich Alert Context: Slack messages include alert severity, the affected resource or service, metric values, and a direct link back to New Relic so team members can jump into the platform for deeper investigation without leaving Slack.
- Acknowledgment & Resolution: When an alert resolves (the condition returns to normal), New Relic sends a follow-up message to Slack confirming the issue is cleared, keeping your team in sync on incident status.
- Setup via Notification Channels: Configuration happens in New Relic’s notification channels interface, where you authenticate with Slack once and then create alert policies that route to your chosen Slack channels.
Key Features & Capabilities
- Real-Time Alert Notifications: Critical incidents appear in Slack within seconds of detection, eliminating email delays and ensuring your team responds faster.
- Channel-Based Alert Routing: Send infrastructure alerts to #ops-alerts, application performance alerts to #dev-alerts, and security-related alerts to #security—keeping noise out of channels where it doesn’t belong.
- Incident Context in Slack: Each alert message includes the condition name, affected entity (server, application, or service), current metric value, and severity level, so responders understand the issue immediately.
- Direct Links to New Relic: Slack messages contain clickable links to the relevant incident or entity in New Relic, allowing team members to drill down into logs, traces, and dashboards without manual navigation.
- Alert Acknowledgment Tracking: Teams can acknowledge alerts within Slack (depending on workflow configuration) to signal that someone is handling the issue, reducing duplicate responses.
- Multi-Channel Delivery: Route different alert types to different channels based on severity, team ownership, or service criticality, so each team sees only the alerts relevant to them.
Setup Difficulty
Easy (5–10 minutes, no code required).
The integration requires no API coding or complex configuration. Here’s the typical flow:
- In New Relic, navigate to Alerts & AI → Notification Channels.
- Click “Add a notification channel” and select Slack as the channel type.
- Click the authorization button to connect your Slack workspace. You’ll be prompted to grant New Relic permission to post messages to your workspace.
- Select which Slack channel(s) New Relic should use for alerts.
- Save the notification channel.
- Create or edit an alert policy and assign the Slack notification channel as the destination.
- Test by triggering a test alert or waiting for a real condition to breach.
If you’re already familiar with New Relic’s alert policy interface, the entire setup takes under 10 minutes. No configuration files, webhooks, or developer involvement needed.
Alternatives & Workarounds
If the native New Relic–Slack integration doesn’t fully meet your needs, consider these options:
- Zapier or Make (Integromat): Both platforms offer pre-built connectors for New Relic and Slack. Use these if you need conditional logic (e.g., “only notify Slack if severity is Critical”) or want to enrich alerts with data from other sources before posting to Slack. Setup takes 10–15 minutes and requires a Zapier or Make account.
- Custom Webhook + Slack Incoming Webhooks: If you need advanced formatting or multi-step workflows, configure New Relic to send alerts to a custom webhook endpoint (your own server or Lambda function), then have that endpoint post formatted messages to Slack. This approach requires developer work but gives you full control over message content and routing logic.
- PagerDuty Integration: If your team uses PagerDuty for incident management, connect New Relic to PagerDuty first, then use PagerDuty’s Slack integration. This adds a layer of incident routing and escalation policies before notifications hit Slack, useful for larger organizations with on-call schedules.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I send different alert types to different Slack channels?
Yes. Create multiple notification channels in New Relic, each pointing to a different Slack channel. Then, in your alert policies, assign the appropriate notification channel based on the type of alert or service. For example, one policy for infrastructure alerts routes to #ops-alerts, while another for application errors routes to #dev-alerts.
Will the integration work if my Slack workspace has restricted permissions?
The New Relic app will need permission to post messages to the channels you specify. If your Slack workspace requires app approval, your Slack admin will need to authorize the New Relic app before you can complete the integration. Check with your Slack workspace admin if you encounter permission errors during setup.
What happens if an alert resolves? Does Slack get notified?
Yes. When the condition that triggered the alert returns to normal, New Relic sends a follow-up message to the same Slack channel confirming the alert has resolved. This keeps your team informed that the issue is cleared and helps prevent unnecessary investigation or escalation.
Can I customize the format of Slack alert messages?
The native integration sends alerts in New Relic’s standard format, which includes severity, entity name, and metric values. If you need custom formatting or conditional logic, use Zapier, Make, or a custom webhook solution to transform the alert before it reaches Slack.
Disclaimer
Integration features and capabilities are subject to change as New Relic and Slack release updates. Always verify current integration features and setup steps on the official New Relic documentation and Slack app marketplace before implementing in production.