New Relic will update its observability tools with new agentic AI features but will stick to its domain of expertise and a partnership strategy for broader forms of IT automation.
New Relic plans to expand its agentic AI support but will work with partners in adjacent markets rather than moving into new territory itself.
This week's launch of new features, all in preview until next quarter, more deeply embed AI agents into the vendor's observability and AIOps platform. But while some of its competitors with similar roots in application performance monitoring expand into directly automating the software delivery lifecycle, New Relic will continue to focus on agentic integrations with partners in those areas, according to Brian Emerson, the company's chief product officer.
"When we've identified a problem with a specific change that happened in the infrastructure or configuration, we can push that information back into an agent on the CI/CD side," with a partner such as Amazon or Microsoft's GitHub, Emerson said. "It used to take hardcoded API integrations to get that work done, and now it's just dynamic and fluid. The agents are smart enough to figure out how to interact, versus having to build API connection points everywhere."
Brian Emerson
Within New Relic, a new SRE Agent will perform incident investigations into observability data alongside incident management tools from ServiceNow, Atlassian and PagerDuty, Emerson said. But New Relic's tools won't include an AI agent control plane to control incident remediation that overlaps with those partner tools.
"ServiceNow doesn't have its own observability stack, so for customers using New Relic, [ServiceNow ITSM] is going to ask the New Relic agent, 'What do you know about the service? What users are impacted?" he said. "That same analysis that our SRE Agent is driving inside of our system, you can now use to answer questions coming from ServiceNow or a different place."
Similarly, a new no-code AI agent builder platform that will soon ship from New Relic isn't meant to replace general-purpose agent builders but to enable New Relic users to refine AI agents' analysis into their own systems. For humans directly using the New Relic system as they triage incidents, these and the new SRE Agent will also surface recommendations using automated root cause analysis and support the automation of repetitive workflows.
Observability's agentic makeover
Within its updated platform, New Relic will also support AI agent monitoring, including business impact analysis for AI applications. This and other planned features, such as support for federated logs on Amazon S3, eBPF network metrics, user notebooks and dynamic homepages instead of dashboards, are similar to features competitors such as Cisco-Splunk, Dynatrace and Datadog have already offered.
Regardless of the vendor, there are a lot of customers that are saying, 'That looks intriguing, that sounds really great, but I need to see it.'
Stephen ElliotAnalyst, IDC
But according to Emerson, "there are no clear winners in the race around AI. It's still new and being kind of defined in a lot of different ways, and it's an opportunity to provide customers with exponentially more value than they currently have in any observability tool."
New Relic, Datadog and Dynatrace all have large customer bases, said Stephen Elliot, an analyst at IDC. All have had to update existing observability tools to adjust to generative and agentic AI, and all must still prove themselves in real-world enterprise environments.
"We're having conversations with execs that bring up, 'Hey, look, I've had root cause analysis for 10 years. Now, this is about an agentic AI ecosystem -- is this going to be better?'" Elliot said. "Regardless of the vendor, there are a lot of customers that are saying, 'That looks intriguing, that sounds really great, but I need to see it.'"
New Relic has had recent struggles at the corporate level, with its acquisition by a private equity firm and an executive reshuffle in 2023, but it was also among the first to unify its data back end and adjust its pricing, beginning in 2020, something most APM and log-monitoring specialists have since had to do to expand into observability.
It's also clear that in a market overwhelmed by a glut of soup-to-nuts AI agent orchestration platforms, some companies see value in deeper focus rather than broader expertise, said Torsten Volk, an analyst at Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget.
"New Relic is doubling down on the operator persona while most of the competition is racing to own the full software delivery lifecycle, but in the envisioned open agentic world where AI agents can collaborate across vendors, this might not be a disadvantage," Volk said. "However, being an 'additional layer' in the stack is risky, as customers might prefer to just get one platform, especially since even the most open platform is still very hard to migrate away from."
Beth Pariseau, a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget, is an award-winning veteran of IT journalism. Have a tip? Email her.
Brian Emerson
