07/21/2025 | News release | Distributed by Public on 07/21/2025 05:02
Cloud-native teams seek flexibility without compromising visibility, and OpenTelemetry (OTel) has rapidly emerged as the open standard for instrumenting modern applications. Yet the rise of OTel has also raised a new challenge: managing its inherent complexity. OTel usually requires significant engineering effort for setup and configuration, but what if you could have a single great APM experience regardless of whether your data comes from New Relic agents or OTel instrumentation..
Today, we're announcing the general availability of New Relic's APM + OpenTelemetry Convergence-a powerful capability to bring New Relic best-in-class APM experience to OTel data sources. But how does it work? When you send standard OTel data to New Relic, we use our powerful intelligent platform to produce a normalized copy of the data conforming to New Relic's APM semantic conventions resulting in:
This processing works with the various versions of OTel semantic conventions. As you migrate and upgrade instrumentation in a maturing OpenTelemetry landscape, the APM experience will continue to work seamlessly, without any need to update dashboards or alert conditions written against the New Relic APM semantic conventions. This simplifies migration efforts between New Relic agents and OpenTelemetry, or vice versa.
Gone are the days of fragmented visibility. New Relic now treats OTel signals (metrics, traces, and logs) as first-class citizens, enabling users to seamlessly monitor and troubleshoot applications instrumented with OpenTelemetry alongside traditional APM agents.
Many organizations are adopting OpenTelemetry to reduce dependency on proprietary tools and unify instrumentation practices across teams. New Relic meets you where you are, offering:
OpenTelemetry is powerful, but its components vary in maturity across languages. New Relic helps you choose what works best for your environment:
What sets New Relic apart isn't just ingesting OpenTelemetry data; it's what you can do with it.
New Relic knows that creating the best observability backend for OpenTelemetry data is a strategic game-changer. This is why we are releasing this capability as a part of our transparent consumption pricing. Only pay for what you use, no additional SKUs required.
Whether you're starting from scratch or expanding OpenTelemetry adoption, New Relic makes onboarding easy. Here's how:
Want a more detailed guide? Check out our OpenTelemetry + New Relic integration documentation.
Ready to converge your observability strategy?
Whether you're currently instrumenting your applications with OpenTelemetry, using New Relic's APM agents, or planning a hybrid approach-there's no need to choose one over the other. Now you can future-proof your instrumentation, remove data silos and simplify your operations, all within the same intelligent platform.