Source: helpnetsecurity.com | Originally reported September 2019
New Relic Unveils a New Generation of Observability at FutureStack 2019
At its annual FutureStack conference in New York City, New Relic announced a series of significant platform innovations centred on making New Relic One the industry’s first observability platform described as simultaneously open, connected, and programmable. CEO and founder Lew Cirne led the announcements, which included new products for log management, distributed tracing, metrics ingestion, and AI-powered incident response.
The additions respond directly to how modern engineering teams operate: running distributed, containerised workloads across multiple clouds, often managing data from a heterogeneous mix of agents, open-source tools, and third-party services. New Relic One aims to consolidate that data into a single platform with built-in intelligence and extensibility.
“New Relic One is now the world’s first observability platform that is open, enabling customers to bring in agent-based and open telemetry data so they have no blind spots; connected, allowing customers to see relationships between their systems so they can act more quickly and effectively; and programmable, empowering customers to build entirely new applications on top of New Relic to fuel their business. It’s not a platform unless you can build apps on it.”
— Lew Cirne, CEO and Founder, New Relic
Programmability: Building Custom Applications on New Relic One
One of the headline announcements was the general availability of programmability across the New Relic One platform. This capability allows New Relic customers, partners, and developers to build purpose-built applications directly on top of New Relic One — combining observability data with their own business data in a single interface.
Key Programmability Features
- Familiar tech stack: Applications are built using React.js and GraphQL — widely used technologies in modern web development — lowering the barrier to entry for engineering teams already familiar with the JavaScript ecosystem.
- Fast time-to-app: New Relic claims developers can go from idea to working application in minutes, not days.
- No additional cost: Programmability is available to all existing New Relic customers at no extra charge.
- Open-source app catalogue: New Relic released an initial set of applications, co-developed with early-access customers and partners, on GitHub under the Apache licence.
“The new programmability features have equipped us to get significantly more value from New Relic, at no additional cost. Our DevOps & SRE teams are now able to create tailored apps, for their specific business needs, that easily fit into our workstream. At an enterprise-scale, programmability has enabled an agility in data for both application and platform teams.”
— Joshua Biggley, Sr. Engineer, Enterprise Monitoring, Cardinal Health
Initial Open-Source New Relic One Applications
New Relic released the following apps as free, open-source downloads from GitHub at launch:
- Cloud Optimize — Compares provisioned cloud resource sizes against actual utilisation, helping teams identify over-provisioned infrastructure and reduce cloud spend.
- GitHub Integration — Surfaces service ownership and recent commit history directly within New Relic One, so on-call engineers can immediately understand what a service does and who last changed it.
- Site Analyzer — Models how improvements to performance KPIs such as page load time and traffic volume can translate into better conversion and customer experience metrics.
- Status Page — Aggregates Statuspage.io status feeds into a single dashboard, giving teams a unified view of upstream dependencies during an incident.
- Customer Journeys — Tracks cohort progress through conversion funnels, providing product and engineering teams with visibility into how user behaviour correlates with technical performance.
Open: New Relic Logs, Traces, and Metrics
New Relic’s “open” pillar focuses on eliminating blind spots by making it straightforward to ingest the full range of telemetry data — logs, metrics, events, and traces — regardless of source.
New Relic Logs
New Relic Logs is a log management capability integrated directly into New Relic One. Rather than context-switching between a dedicated log aggregation tool and an APM or infrastructure dashboard, teams can search, filter, and correlate log data alongside application traces and infrastructure metrics in a single interface.
- Ad hoc log searches return results without pre-defined indexing configurations.
- Designed to scale without the operational overhead of self-hosted log management solutions (e.g. managing Elasticsearch clusters).
- Available to New Relic customers at time of announcement.
New Relic Traces and New Relic Metrics
New Relic Traces and New Relic Metrics extend the platform’s data ingestion capabilities to cover distributed tracing and time-series metrics from any source — not just New Relic’s own agents.
- Agent-based and agentless: Teams can send data from existing New Relic agents or route telemetry from open-source and third-party instrumentation directly into the platform.
- OpenTelemetry support: New Relic confirmed active contributions to and support for the OpenTelemetry project, as well as involvement in AdoptOpenJDK and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
- Both products were made generally available at FutureStack 2019.
Together, Logs, Traces, and Metrics cover the four pillars of observability telemetry (the fourth being Events), giving teams a complete data foundation within a single platform.
Connected: New Relic AI for AIOps and Smarter Incident Response
New Relic AI is the company’s answer to alert fatigue — a chronic problem for DevOps, SRE, and on-call engineering teams operating large-scale systems. The product applies machine learning to correlate, aggregate, and de-duplicate incident signals, presenting teams with a prioritised, contextualised view of issues rather than a flood of raw alerts.
New Relic AI Capabilities
- Noise reduction: New Relic reported that initial customers observed more than 80% reduction in alerting noise. (See review notes.)
- Automatic anomaly detection: The system identifies unusual behaviour in production metrics without requiring teams to define manual thresholds for every signal.
- PagerDuty integration: New Relic AI connects directly with PagerDuty, enriching incidents with contextual observability data without requiring changes to existing on-call rotations or escalation policies.
- Slack integration: Critical incident context and anomaly alerts are surfaced in Slack channels, keeping teams informed in the tools they already use during an incident.
- Reduced MTTR: By automatically correlating related alerts and surfacing probable root causes, New Relic AI aims to cut mean time to resolution.
Why This Matters for DevOps and SRE Teams
The FutureStack 2019 announcements reflect a broader shift in how observability platforms are expected to work. Stitching together separate tools for logs, metrics, traces, and alerting introduces toil, context loss, and integration maintenance burden. The New Relic One direction — a unified data plane with open ingest, cross-signal correlation, and a programmable surface for custom applications — addresses operational pain points that are well-recognised across the industry.
For teams already invested in open-source telemetry standards like OpenTelemetry, New Relic’s stated commitment to those projects (including contributions to CNCF) signals that vendor lock-in at the instrumentation layer is less of a concern than it was with earlier generations of APM tooling.
The programmability layer is particularly notable for platform engineering teams: the ability to embed observability data into custom internal tooling — without maintaining a separate backend — has meaningful implications for developer experience and operational efficiency at scale.