Platform Capabilities
Platform Capabilities
This domain tests the shared plumbing behind every product: the entity model, account structure, APIs, alerting, dashboards, and access control.
Core rules
- Everything observable is an entity with a domain (APM, BROWSER, INFRA, MOBILE, SYNTH), a type, a GUID, and tags. Workloads group entities so one health status rolls up across a service.
- Accounts are organized as a parent account with optional sub-accounts and data partitions; data is queried per account unless you use cross-account queries.
- User types are basic, core, and full platform; roles and custom roles grant capabilities, and authentication domains enable SAML SSO and SCIM provisioning.
- NerdGraph is the GraphQL API used for configuration and queries; Terraform, the New Relic CLI, and nrq build on it. REST v2 remains for older integrations.
- Alerting is policy to condition to notification. A condition with no workflow or destination linked to its policy creates incidents nobody hears about.
- Dashboards are NRQL-driven; service levels define SLIs with SLO targets and error budgets; change tracking and vulnerability management add deployment context and security findings.
Worked example
An admin wants one alert when any of twelve entities in a payment flow degrades. Tagging all twelve entities and placing them in a workload lets a single alert condition scope to the workload, instead of writing twelve near-identical conditions that drift apart over time.
Traps
- Building a dashboard and assuming it alerts; dashboards are visual only.
- Forgetting that a policy must be connected to a workflow or destination to notify anyone.
- Querying the wrong account scope in NRQL and concluding data is missing.
- Granting full platform seats to people who only need to view dashboards.