Platform Capabilities (Alerts, Dashboards, OpenTelemetry, Fleet Control)
Platform Capabilities covers the shared services around telemetry: alerts, dashboards, OpenTelemetry ingestion, and Fleet Control. The exam tests configuration choices and the failure modes that make a correct-looking alert or dashboard behave incorrectly.
Core rules
- Alert policies contain conditions. Conditions can be NRQL, APM, infrastructure, synthetic, or anomaly-based; thresholds can be static or outlier. A policy is applied to entities or an account, and destinations determine who is notified. Muting rules suppress notifications without deleting the condition.
- Loss-of-signal conditions catch the case where telemetry stops, which a threshold condition cannot.
- Dashboards are built from NRQL widgets, variables, facets, and linked dashboards. Variables change the query scope at view time; a widget that ignores the variable looks broken to the viewer.
- OpenTelemetry data reaches New Relic through OTLP: gRPC on port 4317 and HTTP on port 4318, at otlp.nr-data.net (EU: otlp.eu01.nr-data.net). Authenticate with the api-key header carrying a license key. The collector's service.name and resource attributes map telemetry to entities.
- Fleet Control manages agent fleets: versions, configurations, and staged rollout across hosts or environments, reducing one-by-one agent changes.
Worked example
A team sends OTel traces to the collector but sees no entities. The collector exports to https://otlp.nr-data.net:4318 with an api-key header set to an insights insert key. The endpoint returns 403. Replacing the insert key with the account license key and keeping service.name in the resource attributes produces entities and traces.
Traps
Do not use an insights insert key for OTLP. Check the EU endpoint if data residency requires it. Static thresholds on bursty metrics create noise; use anomaly or baseline conditions. A dashboard variable that is not referenced in the NRQL does nothing.