In short: If your team already uses New Relic, an administrator can switch on this optional bridge so New Relic watches your sites from its own network and any alerts it raises land right in your Maintena Uptime incident timeline. It is off by default, purely advanced, and it complements Uptime rather than replacing it.
What it is
The New Relic Bridge is an optional, advanced integration for teams who already use New Relic. It is not a core Maintena feature and it is off by default. You do not need it to get full monitoring: your built-in Uptime monitor is always the authoritative check on whether your site is reachable.
What the bridge adds, when enabled, is a free independent second opinion. It asks New Relic to keep an eye on your sites too, from New Relic's own infrastructure. If New Relic ever spots that a site is down, that news is folded straight into the same incident timeline your Uptime monitor already uses. One timeline, one story, whether the alert came from Maintena or from New Relic.
It has no dashboard, screen, or menu of its own inside Maintena. Everything it produces shows up in your existing Uptime incident history.
How it works
The bridge does two simple things and nothing more.
A free external ping monitor
When the integration is enabled and a site has Uptime monitoring turned on, Maintena asks New Relic to create a lightweight "ping" monitor for that site. A ping monitor simply checks, every few minutes, that your site answers from a location outside Maintena's own network. On New Relic's free tier these ping monitors are free and unlimited, which is exactly why the bridge uses them.
This happens automatically the next time the site is saved. It creates the monitor once and then leaves it alone.
Alerts folded into your timeline
If New Relic decides a site is failing, it sends a secure message back to Maintena. Maintena matches it to the right site and opens an incident in your Uptime timeline, labelled so you can see it came from New Relic. When New Relic reports the site is healthy again, Maintena resolves that incident and records how long it lasted.
| What happens in New Relic | What you see in Maintena |
|---|---|
| A site is added with Uptime monitoring on | A free ping monitor is quietly created for it in New Relic |
| New Relic detects the site is down | A new incident opens in your Uptime timeline |
| The outage continues | It stays a single incident, not a flood of duplicates |
| New Relic sees the site recover | The incident is resolved, with its total downtime recorded |
A few points worth knowing about how it behaves:
- The built-in Uptime monitor stays in charge. New Relic is a parallel, independent check, never a replacement. Turning the bridge off leaves your core monitoring completely intact.
- Incoming alerts are protected by a shared secret, so only genuine messages from your New Relic account are accepted.
- If New Relic is ever unreachable or a key is wrong, the bridge fails quietly in the background. It never blocks you from creating or saving a site.
What you need to do
For most customers the answer is nothing. The bridge is optional and off by default, and Maintena monitors your sites fully without it. Only turn it on if your team already runs New Relic and wants that extra independent check.
If you do want it, an administrator handles the setup:
- Create or use a New Relic account. The free tier is enough, because the ping monitors this uses are free and unlimited.
- Gather your New Relic details. You will need your account id and a New Relic User API key. Treat the API key like a password.
- Choose a webhook secret. Pick a long, random string. New Relic sends this back with every alert so Maintena knows the message is genuine.
- Enable the bridge in Maintena's configuration. An administrator sets the master switch plus the account id, API key, and webhook secret. Until all of these are in place, the bridge stays completely inert.
- Point New Relic's alerts back at Maintena. In New Relic, set up an alert condition on your monitors and a webhook that notifies Maintena when a site goes down or recovers, including the matching secret. New Relic cannot configure this side for you, so it is a one-time manual step in New Relic.
That is the entire setup. There is no per-site switch to flip: any site with Uptime monitoring on is included automatically once the bridge is enabled. A site that existed before you enabled it gets its ping monitor the next time it is edited and saved.
For pricing questions about your Maintena plan, see Billing & Subscriptions. The New Relic side, using its free ping monitors, carries no cost of its own.
Good to know
- It is genuinely optional. With the bridge off, none of this runs and your monitoring is unaffected. It is designed as an add-on for New Relic users, not a box everyone needs to tick.
- Maintena does not read data back from New Relic. The bridge only asks New Relic to watch a site and then listens for alerts. To browse New Relic's own charts and metrics, log in to New Relic directly. Inside Maintena you will only ever see the resulting incidents.
- It complements Uptime, it does not replace it. Think of it as a redundant second pair of eyes from a different network, feeding into the timeline you already trust.
On the roadmap
The bridge is intentionally thin today, and a few things are not built yet:
- Keeping monitors in step with changes. The ping monitor is created once. If a site's address later changes, or a site is removed, the matching New Relic monitor is not automatically updated or cleaned up. That tidying is currently manual in New Relic.
- A New Relic view inside Maintena. There is no New Relic dashboard, chart, or metric in the app. New Relic's alerts appear in your Uptime timeline, but its data lives in New Relic.
- Per-site control. There is no separate on/off switch for New Relic per site. It follows your existing Uptime monitoring toggle for the whole set of monitored sites.
- European New Relic accounts. Accounts hosted in New Relic's EU region need a small configuration change before the bridge can create monitors. If your account is on the EU data centre, mention it to your administrator during setup.