New Relic Unveils AI Agent Platform and OpenTelemetry Tools

Businesses are rolling out software to build and monitor AI agents, aiming to drive enterprise adoption. New Relic is following this trend. As the data observability firm launches its own AI agent platform, it recognizes it is not the only option available.

On Tuesday, New Relic introduced a no-code agentic platform that enables enterprises to create data observability AI agents. These agents monitor company data to detect bugs and issues before they impact products. Named the New Relic Agentic Platform, it allows companies to deploy pre-built agents and manage existing bots.

The platform also supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which connects AI applications to external data sources, and integrates with other New Relic tools.

New Relic does not aim to be the sole platform for managing and deploying all AI agents, Brian Emerson, the company’s new chief product officer, told TechCrunch. Instead, the goal is to provide clients with agent-building capabilities for observability that match what they receive elsewhere.

“We are not building this as a general-purpose solution,” Emerson said. “We are building it for outcomes specific to observability. It also allows us to collaborate with the broader ecosystem and existing tools, while keeping the focus on solving problems relevant to our personas and the observability domain.”

Software for managing AI agents has proliferated recently as companies seek to address enterprise concerns about granting AI agents access to data and software.

Salesforce was arguably the first to release an agent platform in late 2024, calling it Agentforce. OpenAI launched its own version, OpenAI Frontier, earlier this year. Research organization Gartner has described such agent platforms as “necessary infrastructure” and a critical component for enterprise AI adoption.

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Continuing the theme of increasing enterprise tech adoption, New Relic also announced new tools focused on OpenTelemetry (OTel), an open-source observability framework.

The company stated that its application performance monitoring (APM) agents now include OTel capabilities, allowing enterprises to manage OTel data streams alongside other data sources in one place. This aims to solve a previous fragmentation issue that hindered mass enterprise adoption of the OTel framework.

“Simply send your OTel data to us,” said Nic Benders, chief technology strategist at New Relic. “What we have discovered in this process is that running all the OTel [data] collectors is a burden for many teams worldwide. Therefore, providing OTel-like fleet management is very important.”