New Relic launches new AI agent platform and OpenTelemetry tools | TechCrunch

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. As the data observability company launches an AI agent platform of its own, it knows it isn’t the only game in town.

New Relic on Tuesday 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. Called New Relic Agentic Platform, it lets companies deploy prebuilt agents and manage existing bots as well.

It also supports the model context protocol (MCP), which connects AI applications to external data sources and integrates with other New Relic tools.

New Relic isn’t looking to be the only platform that companies use to manage and deploy all of their AI agents, Brian Emerson, the startup’s new chief product officer, told TechCrunch. Instead, the aim is to offer clients the same agent-building capabilities they are getting elsewhere for observability as well.

“We’re not building this as 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.”

Software that lets users manage AI agents has proliferated in recent months as companies look to figure out how to quell enterprises’ fears about giving AI agents access to their data and software.

Salesforce was arguably the first to release an agent platform in late 2024, calling it Agentforce. OpenAI launched its own version of the technology, 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.

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 said its application performance monitoring (APM) agents are now equipped with OTel capabilities, letting enterprises manage OTel data streams alongside their other data sources in one place. This is aimed at solving a previous fragmentation problem that was holding up mass enterprise adoption of the OTel framework.

“Just send your OTel data to us,” Nic Benders, chief technology strategist at New Relic, said. “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.”