API
New Relic
New Relic will shut off its NRQL Drop Filter Rules API on 31 August 2026, moving drop-rule management to the Pipeline Cloud Rules API and the Pipeline Control UI
departs 31 Aug 2026
What this means for you
Drop filter rules let New Relic customers discard unwanted telemetry — noisy logs, metrics, or spans — before it is stored, which is how teams keep ingest costs and clutter under control. New Relic announced on 21 May 2025 that the NRQL Drop Filter Rules API reaches end of life on 31 August 2026 at 16:00 UTC. After that moment, the old API for creating and managing drop rules stops working. Teams that provision drop rules as code — through Terraform, CI pipelines, or NerdGraph automation calling the drop-rules mutations — lose the ability to manage them that way unless they have migrated. Existing rules keep running; what goes away is the programmatic surface for changing them.
Where to go
New Relic directs users to the Pipeline Cloud Rules API for programmatic drop-rule management, and to the centralized Pipeline Control UI for the console workflow. Re-point any infrastructure-as-code, scripts, or automation that create or update drop rules from the old NRQL Drop Filter Rules API to the Pipeline Cloud Rules API, and re-test that rules still apply as intended. This is a management-plane migration — your currently configured rules continue to filter data — so the work is confined to whatever tooling calls the API, but it must be done before 31 August 2026 16:00 UTC.
- Pipeline Cloud Rules API — New Relic's successor for programmatic drop-rule management
- Pipeline Control UI — the console workflow for managing drop rules
This one is narrow but easy to miss, because it lives in the plumbing rather than the product. New Relic is ending its NRQL Drop Filter Rules API on 31 August 2026 at 16:00 UTC, a date it announced back on 21 May 2025.
Drop filter rules are how New Relic customers throw away telemetry they do not want to pay to store — a firehose of debug logs, a metric no one reads, spans from a health-check endpoint. Managing those rules through the API is common on teams that treat observability config as code: the rules get created and updated by Terraform, a CI job, or a NerdGraph script, so they are version-controlled alongside everything else. It is exactly those teams the end-of-life affects. On the shutdown date, the old API for creating and managing drop rules stops answering.
Worth being precise about the blast radius: this is a management-plane change, not a data-plane one. The drop rules you already have configured keep filtering telemetry as before — nothing about your stored data changes on 31 August. What disappears is the ability to create or modify rules through the old API. So the migration is bounded to whatever tooling calls it.
The path forward is New Relic’s Pipeline Cloud Rules API for the programmatic workflow, with the centralized Pipeline Control UI for anyone managing rules by hand. Re-point your infrastructure-as-code and scripts at the new API, confirm your rules still match and drop what they should, and land the change before the August deadline. Because existing rules keep working, there is no visible fire to force the issue — which is precisely why it is the kind of end-of-life that sits untouched until an automated terraform apply fails months from now.
Entry changelog
- — last reviewed.
- — Entry created from New Relic's official end-of-life notice for the NRQL Drop Filter Rules API. Announced 21 May 2025; end of life 31 August 2026 16:00 UTC. Surfaced via Layer-2 discovery, written from the primary New Relic docs page.
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