APM hybrid agents and Collector Observability give customers choice for app instrumentation and a seamless bridge to open standards at their own pace

NEW RELIC ADVANCE—New Relic, the Intelligent Observability Company, today announced innovations that empower businesses to unlock the full potential of OpenTelemetry (OTel) with more ease and efficiency than ever before. The new capabilities remove the burden and resource drain of integration work, clearing a seamless and cost-effective path for enterprises leveraging open standards.

Best-of-both-worlds instrumentation for unified visibility across the entire software ecosystem

OTel—which provides the standardized tools and APIs needed to capture and transmit telemetry data for any observability stack—is growing in enterprise use, with nearly half of organizations using it in production. However, the shift toward OTel has historically forced a compromise: adopt open standards at the cost of massive refactoring and lost functionality or remain with proprietary agents and risk isolation. This ‘migration tax’ has prevented many enterprises from modernizing their stacks, creating a critical need for a bridge between the two ecosystems. New Relic APM agents now offer enhanced OTel compatibility by embedding OTel API compatibility and instrumentation support directly into the existing language agents. New Relic is committed to furthering the vendor-neutral, implementation-neutral vision of OTel, where telemetry is consumed directly from third-party open source libraries instrumented using the OTel APIs.

New Relic’s APM hybrid agents provide a unified data foundation to easily build, deploy, and manage data collection while providing comprehensive backward compatibility with existing New Relic dashboards and alerts, allowing organizations to modernize their telemetry stacks without a 'rip-and-replace' effort. This unified approach ensures seamless mixed-mode interoperability—e.g., keeping traces intact across fragmented environments—while empowering teams to adopt OTel capabilities like dimensional metrics and span links at their own pace. Only New Relic unifies these capabilities into a single, intelligent agent that handles both data streams.

“We believe that vendor lock-in should never be a barrier to innovation. Accessing the power of OTel should be seamless, allowing every business to leverage open standards without the traditional complexity,” said New Relic Chief Product Officer Brian Emerson. “With our newest capabilities, we’ve removed the innovation tax many enterprises face when looking to embrace open standards. With an easier migration to OTel, organizations avoid expensive engineering toil, retraining costs, and operational disruptions. Businesses can finally adopt OTel at their own pace, turning open standards into a strategic tailwind rather than a technical burden.”

Standardize on OTel with Infra NRDOT, minus the operational overhead

New Relic’s OTel-based infrastructure monitoring, built on the New Relic Distribution of OpenTelemetry (NRDOT), eliminates the need to choose between rigid proprietary agents and the toil of building OTel pipelines from scratch. It delivers OTel-native visibility for hosts and applications, mapped directly into New Relic dashboards and curated experiences. Its integrated Adaptive Telemetry Processor ensures lean, cost-efficient host process telemetry by filtering out noise. Customers only pay for the most critical insights, allowing teams to standardize on OTel without compromising visibility or increasing data ingestion costs. For customers leveraging Infra NRDOT, New Relic offers enterprise-grade customer support.

Confidently scale OTel adoption through first-class Collector Observability

New Relic’s Collector Observability provides customers with a dedicated, first-class experience for monitoring the health and performance of their OTel Collectors, a proxy that acts as the ‘middleware’ for a business’s observability data. Operating OTel Collectors can leave engineers flying blind because it’s a challenge to distinguish between resource saturation, configuration errors, or connectivity issues. New Relic’s Collector Observability capability reduces these barriers and provides real-time visibility into collector health and performance. This empowers customers to resolve bottlenecks before they lead to data loss, ensuring a seamless and scalable path to OTel adoption.

Availability

New Relic APM hybrid agents, Infra NRDOT and Collector Observability are now available to New Relic customers.

Learn more

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About New Relic

The New Relic Intelligent Observability Platform helps businesses eliminate interruptions in digital experiences. New Relic is the only AI-strengthened platform to unify and pair telemetry data to provide clarity over your entire digital estate. We move your problem solving past proactive to predictive by processing the right data at the right time to maximize value and control costs. That’s why businesses around the world—including Adidas Runtastic, Domino’s, GoTo Group, Ryanair, Swiggy, Topgolf, and William Hill—run on New Relic to drive innovation, improve reliability, and deliver exceptional customer experiences to fuel growth.

Visit: www.newrelic.com.

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New Relic unveils APM hybrid agents and Collector Observability to give customers choice for app instrumentation and a seamless bridge to leveraging OpenTelemetry at their own pace.