New Relic connects observability platform to business outcomes

New Relic this week updated its observability platform with new capabilities designed to tie application health and performance directly to business outcomes. The updates will help enterprises that are embedding AI into revenue-generating applications and using code generation tools in their software development processes, New Relic says. Brian Emerson, New Relic’s chief product officer, says there are three forces reshaping enterprise observability: AI-assisted development, the application explosion that those tools will produce, and the unpredictability introduced when AI is embedded directly into customer-facing workloads. “When you start embedding AI into applications, non-deterministic things start happening,” Emerson says. “Failures are kind of silent. You need to understand behavior patterns; that’s a very different world than ‘are things red, yellow, or green.’” For instance, a new feature called Intelligent Workloads can automate the discovery and mapping of application dependencies to create a “360-degree view” of performance, infrastructure, and end-user impact. Intelligent Workloads will communicate key performance indicators (KPI) such as abandoned carts and conversion rates rather than simple green or red technical indicators. “When your system is slow, is it getting worse, or is that fine?” says Nic Benders, chief technology strategist at New Relic. “Sure, your CPU is high. That’s an infrastructure concern, but what is the impact on whatever it is that you exist to do? That is your number one concern, and we should be speaking to you about that.” With this release, New Relic also introduced a site reliability engineering (SRE) agent that uses telemetry data such as metrics, events, logs, traces, and node relationships to automate root-cause analysis and prioritize alerts to engineers. New Relic envisions a “digital war room” in which AI agents orchestrate incident response across network, database, and application domains, while network engineers review and approve recommended actions rather than doing the initial triage. New Relic’s 2025 Observability Forecast found that the majority of organizations are aware of the importance of resolving issues before they impact performance, and the use of AI monitoring capabilities grew from 42% in 2024 to 54% in 2025. Industry watchers believe that vision will take some time to become a reality across enterprise organizations. “Every organization is a snowflake in its adoption curve and readiness timeline,” says Stephen Elliot, global group vice president at IDC. “IT behavioral change is one of the most underreported requirements for agentic AI adoption. Trust is the required ingredient.” New Relic also expanded its Digital Experience Monitoring suite to support micro frontend (MFE) architectures, where web applications are broken into smaller, team-managed components. Engineers can now monitor every component and collect metrics on performance timing, errors, renders, and lifecycle methods to trace how dependencies affect the end-user experience. Separate agentic AI monitoring capabilities add a service map of agent-to-agent interactions and drill-down traces for individual agents and tools, which New Relic says will address a visibility gap as multi-agent deployments grow. IDC’s Elliot says the business-outcome framing is an industry-wide trend, but that New Relic’s extension of digital experience management into revenue intelligence is meaningful. “Every vendor needs to communicate value in both technology and business terms,” he explains. “One is no longer enough.” Elliott also says New Relic’s hybrid OpenTelemetry approach, which lets customers use OTEL instrumentation without separate collector infrastructure, is increasingly table stakes for enterprise buyers. “OTEL is here to stay, and its adoption continues to increase. It is increasingly a product requirement to support as more enterprises make it part of their observability strategies,” Elliot says. Intelligent Workloads is available as a preview for users of New Relic’s transaction monitoring solution, Transaction 360. The remaining capabilities are available in preview to all New Relic platform users.