New Relic enhances OpenTelemetry infrastructure monitoring

New Relic has announced new capabilities designed to simplify and accelerate enterprise adoption of OpenTelemetry (OTel). The updates aim to reduce the operational and integration burden often associated with moving to open standards, enabling organisations to modernise their observability practices with less disruption.

Unified Visibility Across Open and Proprietary Environments

OpenTelemetry provides standardised tools and APIs to capture and transmit telemetry data across observability platforms. While its enterprise adoption is increasing, organisations have often faced a trade-off: adopt open standards and undertake significant refactoring, or retain proprietary agents and risk limited interoperability. This transition cost has slowed modernisation efforts.

New Relic’s APM agents now include embedded OTel API compatibility and instrumentation support within existing language agents. This approach is intended to enable organisations to use OTel-compatible instrumentation while maintaining compatibility with existing dashboards and alerts. The hybrid model supports mixed environments, helping preserve trace continuity and enabling gradual adoption of features such as dimensional metrics and span links without requiring a full system replacement.

Infrastructure Monitoring with Reduced Operational Complexity

The company has also introduced enhancements to its OTel-based infrastructure monitoring, built on the New Relic Distribution of OpenTelemetry (NRDOT). The offering is designed to provide OTel-native visibility for hosts and applications, integrated with New Relic dashboards. An Adaptive Telemetry Processor filters telemetry data to reduce unnecessary ingestion and associated costs.

In addition, New Relic has introduced Collector Observability, a capability that provides visibility into the health and performance of OTel Collectors. Since collectors function as middleware for observability data, diagnosing issues such as resource constraints, configuration errors or connectivity problems can be complex. The new feature is intended to provide real-time monitoring to help organisations identify and resolve bottlenecks before they affect data reliability.

Company executives said the updates are aimed at reducing the technical and operational barriers associated with adopting open standards in observability environments.