New Relic launches new AI agent platform and OpenTelemetry tools

In a bid to enhance enterprise adoption of AI, New Relic has launched a new no-code AI agent platform designed to help companies monitor their data effectively. This platform, named the New Relic Agentic Platform, enables businesses to create and manage data observability AI agents that proactively identify bugs and issues before they can disrupt operations. The Agentic Platform allows firms to deploy pre-built agents while also managing their existing bots. It incorporates the model context protocol (MCP), which facilitates connections between AI applications and external data sources, ensuring seamless integration with New Relic's suite of tools. Brian Emerson, New Relic's new chief product officer, emphasized that the company does not aim to be the sole provider of AI agent management solutions. Instead, the focus is on empowering clients with similar agent-building capabilities that they can find elsewhere, specifically tailored towards observability needs. "We’re not building this as general purpose," Emerson stated, highlighting the platform's targeted outcomes in the observability domain. The demand for software that allows users to manage AI agents has surged recently, as organizations seek to alleviate concerns about data access and security. Notable competitors in this space include Salesforce, which launched its Agentforce platform in late 2024, and OpenAI, which introduced OpenAI Frontier earlier this year. Research firm Gartner has identified such agent platforms as essential infrastructure for driving enterprise AI adoption. In addition to the AI platform, New Relic introduced tools that enhance OpenTelemetry (OTel), an open-source observability framework. The company's application performance monitoring (APM) agents now include OTel capabilities, enabling businesses to streamline the management of OTel data streams alongside other data sources. This improvement addresses previous fragmentation issues that hindered widespread enterprise adoption of the OTel framework. Nic Benders, chief technology strategist at New Relic, noted, "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 fleet management system is crucial."