New Relic unveils AI agent platform and expanded OpenTelemetry capabilities

Companies across the enterprise tech world are racing to launch tools that help businesses build, deploy, and monitor AI agents, as vendors aim to drive broader AI adoption within large organisations. New Relic is joining that wave — and it’s doing so with the understanding that it’s entering a crowded market rather than trying to be the only platform enterprises rely on.

On Tuesday, New Relic introduced a new no-code agentic product called the New Relic Agentic Platform. The platform is designed to help enterprises assemble and deploy data observability AI agents that monitor a company’s data and systems to detect bugs and issues early — ideally before they disrupt products and services. The offering also supports deploying prebuilt agents and managing customer-used bots.

New Relic said the platform supports the model context protocol (MCP), which enables AI applications to connect to external data sources. In addition, MCP support enables the platform to integrate with other New Relic tools, keeping agent-driven workflows directly tied into the company’s broader observability stack.

New Relic is not positioning this as a universal agent platform meant to control every AI agent a company runs, according to Brian Emerson, the company’s new chief product officer. Instead, Emerson said the goal is to give customers agent-building capabilities specifically for observability, similar to what they may already use on other platforms across different parts of their business.

“We’re not building this as a general purpose,” Emerson said. “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.”

Tools focused on managing AI agents have multiplied in recent months as companies try to address enterprise hesitation about granting them access to critical data, internal systems, and software workflows.

Salesforce was among the early major players to launch an agent platform, Agentforce, in late 2024. OpenAI released its own agent platform, OpenAI Frontier, earlier this year. Research firm Gartner has described agent platforms as “necessary infrastructure” and a key part of getting enterprises to adopt AI meaningfully.

Alongside its agent platform announcement, New Relic also introduced additional updates to expand enterprise support for OpenTelemetry (OTel), the open-source observability framework.

The company said its application performance monitoring (APM) agents now include OTel capabilities, enabling enterprises to manage OTel data streams alongside other data sources in a single environment. New Relic said this helps address a fragmentation challenge that has previously slowed broader enterprise adoption of OpenTelemetry.

“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 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 very important.”