New Relic launches new AI agent platform and OpenTelemetry tools

Source: TechCrunch

New Relic AI Agent Platform

Companies are increasingly launching software to build and monitor AI agents in an effort to get enterprises to adopt AI. New Relic is no different. On Tuesday, the data observability company unveiled a no‑code agentic platform that lets enterprises put together data‑observability AI agents that monitor a company’s data to catch bugs and issues before they disrupt products.

The New Relic Agentic Platform lets companies:

• Deploy pre‑built agents and manage existing bots.
• Support the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which connects AI applications to external data sources.
• Integrate with other New Relic tools.

Brian Emerson, New Relic’s chief product officer, explained that the platform is purpose‑built for observability outcomes rather than a general‑purpose AI solution:

“We’re not building this as general purpose. We’re building it for outcomes that we care about inside observability. It’s also a world that allows us to work with the rest of the ecosystem or tools that exist out there, but bring it back into the context of problems we’re trying to solve around our personas and the observability domain.”

Comparison with Other Agent Platforms

Software that lets users manage AI agents has proliferated in recent months as companies look to address enterprises’ concerns about granting AI agents access to their data and software.

• Salesforce released an agent platform in late 2024 called Agentforce.
• OpenAI launched its own version, OpenAI Frontier, earlier this year.
• Research organization Gartner has called such agent platforms “necessary infrastructure” and a critical component of getting enterprises to adopt AI (source).

OpenTelemetry Tools

Sticking with the theme of increasing enterprise tech adoption, New Relic also revealed new tools focused on OpenTelemetry (OTel), an open‑source observability framework.

The company announced that its application performance monitoring (APM) agents are now equipped with OTel capabilities, allowing enterprises to manage OTel data streams alongside other data sources in a single place. This addresses a previous fragmentation problem that was hindering mass enterprise adoption of the OTel framework.

“Just send your OTel data to us,” said Nic Benders, chief technology strategist at New Relic. “What we’ve discovered in this process is that it’s kind of a burden for a lot of teams out there in the world to run all of the OTel [data] collectors. So having an OTel‑like fleet management is something that’s very important.”