An Update on the Synthetic Monitors' MUTED Status EOL on February 29, 2024: Impact on the New Relic Terraform Provider and More Details 📢

[pranav-new-relic]

Hello everyone! 👋

This post has been created to share a few updates and details on the end-of-life of the MUTED status of Synthetic Monitors. This change is scheduled to take place on February 29, 2024, as previously communicated by New Relic and outlined in this guide in the Terraform Registry. It is important to note that these changes will impact the New Relic Terraform Provider only if customers continue to use MUTED as the value for the status argument in Synthetic Monitor resources after the end-of-life date.

EOL of Synthetic Monitors' MUTED Status

As mentioned earlier in this post:

• On February 29, 2024, the planned end-of-life date for the MUTED status of Synthetic Monitors, support for the MUTED status will be discontinued. Hence, MUTED will no longer be a valid value for the status of Synthetic Monitors. The only valid values for status will be ENABLED and DISABLED.
• Additionally, at the EOL, all monitors currently set to MUTED will have their status changed to ENABLED.
• It is important to note that after the EOL, any requests sent to NerdGraph to create or update monitors with the status MUTED will fail, as this status value will no longer be valid.

An Overview of the Impact of this EOL on the New Relic Terraform Provider

As a consequence of the EOL described above, after the EOL, any Terraform operations performed (with Synthetic Monitors in the configuration with the status MUTED) in any version of the New Relic Terraform Provider will fail, as the API will not recognize MUTED as a valid status value and will throw an error.

You will be affected by this end-of-life only if your Terraform configuration continues to use MUTED as the value for the status argument in any of the following resources:

• newrelic_synthetics_monitor
• newrelic_synthetics_broken_links_monitor
• newrelic_synthetics_cert_check_monitor
• newrelic_synthetics_script_monitor
• newrelic_synthetics_step_monitor

More details about the consequences of using MUTED Synthetic Monitors after the EOL have been listed in the following section. If you have not yet transitioned away from using MUTED as the status of Synthetic Monitors in your Terraform configuration, please change the status of these monitors to ENABLED or DISABLED to avoid interruption and consider alternatives to using the MUTED status, as described in the last section of this post.

Soon after the EOL, a new release of the New Relic Terraform Provider will be made, which will invalidate the use of the MUTED status, i.e., starting from this version, in addition to the aforementioned behaviour, using the status MUTED will no longer be allowed, in the aforementioned resources. This release will also include a guide similar to this post, explaining the EOL, its implications, and solutions. The release is planned to occur approximately one week after the EOL, aligning with the completion of this phased EOL (which would conclude with the complete removal of the status MUTED from NerdGraph and the REST API).

Impact of the EOL on Terraform Configuration with MUTED Synthetic Monitors

• If you have Synthetic Monitors with the status MUTED in your Terraform configuration after the end-of-life, validation checks will not obstruct Terraform operations. However, when you perform a terraform apply to create or update Synthetic Monitors with the status MUTED, the operation will fail. The API will throw an error indicating that MUTED is no longer a valid status value.

  • The aforementioned error would be observed at the end-of-life date, and would gradually appear as a generic API error while the phased EOL approaches its completion, since MUTED would be removed as a valid status of Synthetic Monitors. This generic API error would be suggestive of an invalid monitor input MUTED with Synthetic Monitor resources comprising the status MUTED in v3 of the New Relic Terraform Provider; however, with v2 of the New Relic Terraform Provider, a Bad Request (400) error would be thrown, since Synthetic Monitor resources in v2 rely on the REST API, unlike v3 resources, which perform CRUD operations via NerdGraph.

• In addition to the above, as previously communicated by New Relic, all monitors with the status MUTED will have their status changed to ENABLED on the date of the end-of-life. Therefore, any monitors in your Terraform configuration that still have the status MUTED (and have not been changed prior to the end-of-life) will display a drift when attempting to plan or apply the configuration. This is because Synthetics will update the status of these monitors to ENABLED at the end-of-life.

• The solution to both implications mentioned above is to replace all instances of MUTED with either ENABLED or DISABLED for all Synthetic Monitors in your Terraform configuration. This will ensure a successful terraform plan and terraform apply. Additionally, please refer to the options described in the following section to choose an appropriate alternative for enforcing monitor muting through the existing resources provided by the New Relic Terraform Provider.

Alternatives to MUTED Synthetic Monitors

In order to replicate the behaviour of MUTED Synthetic Monitors, alternatives such as Alert Muting Rules or Monitor Downtimes in the New Relic Terraform Provider may be used. More details about these alternatives can be found in this guide.

Should you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out to us.