OpenTelemetry made easy with New Relic

Why adopting OpenTelemetry is  harder than it seems

While open-source software is often presented as a free and accessible alternative to proprietary solutions, the reality of its adoption is frequently more complex and resource-intensive than anticipated. OpenTelemetry (OTel) has quickly become the industry standard for instrumenting applications and infrastructure. It promises flexibility, vendor neutrality, and a strong community. But if you’ve tried to implement it in production, you know the extensive time, expertise, and diligence required to manage its implementation. From configuring collectors to aligning semantic conventions and rebuilding dashboards, OTel adoption often feels like more work than expected.

At New Relic, we believe observability should empower your teams, not slow them down. That’s why we’ve made it our mission to make OpenTelemetry adoption easy, fast, and risk-free — so you can focus on delivering software.

OpenTelemetry Made Easy

Unified APM + OTel Convergence

You shouldn’t have to choose between New Relic’s deep APM insights and OpenTelemetry’s flexibility. With our recent convergence release, any telemetry you send via OTel is automatically normalized across the entire APM experience — including service maps, errors inbox, distributed traces, and dashboards.

Even better, this convergence extends across your Kubernetes environments. Telemetry from APM and OTel-instrumented Kubernetes workloads is automatically correlated, giving you a single, unified view of application and infrastructure health.

And because many organizations adopt OTel in phases, New Relic fully supports hybrid deployments. Whether you’re running APM + OTel in Kubernetes, or mixing New Relic agents with OTel instrumentation, you’ll see all your data in one place — with no broken dashboards, no duplicated effort, and no disruption to your workflows.

Kubernetes Observability in Seconds 

Kubernetes is where most OTel journeys begin — and where complexity skyrockets. That’s why we now provide curated Kubernetes dashboards and automatic metadata enrichment right out of the box. 

With a single Helm chart command, you can deploy New Relic’s Kubernetes integration powered by the OpenTelemetry Collector. This streamlined setup reduces data collection costs and automatically enables all of our curated Kubernetes experiences — the same OOTB dashboards and insights you’d expect from New Relic’s proprietary instrumentation.

And you still have full flexibility: customize your configuration to fit your environment or use any OpenTelemetry collector if you prefer.

The result: Faster time to value for your platform and SRE teams, without needing to build dashboards from scratch.

Pre-configured NRDOT Collectors

The OpenTelemetry Collector is powerful, but it can be daunting to configure and maintain. To simplify deployment, we’ve introduced pre-configured distributions tailored for hosts, Kubernetes, and hybrid environments.

Each NRDOT Collector includes the right set of processors and exporters to optimize data collection, reduce cardinality costs, enrich telemetry with Kubernetes metadata, and automatically enable New Relic’s curated observability experiences.

Because New Relic maintains NRDOT, you also benefit from a faster pace of updates and fixes compared to the upstream community, giving enterprise teams confidence that issues will be resolved quickly without slowing down production workloads.

The result: Lower operational overhead, faster deployments, and a smoother path to scaling OTel across your environments. 

Standards-aligned and future-proof

We’ve expanded support for OTLP traffic and OpenTelemetry semantic conventions across languages and SDKs. This ensures your telemetry aligns with community standards while unlocking all of New Relic’s observability features.

The result: Freedom to instrument how you want today, with confidence that your investment will continue to pay off tomorrow.

Relevance for Today’s Teams

The timing matters. Observability teams are asking how to scale OpenTelemetry without getting overwhelmed by complexity. These latest releases prove that you don’t have to choose between flexibility and simplicity — New Relic delivers both.

By making OTel adoption seamless, we help your teams:

• Accelerate migration from agents to OTel without disruption.
• Correlate Kubernetes performance with application health instantly.
• Simplify operations by using one platform and one UI for all telemetry.
• Avoid vendor lock-in with open standards, giving you the freedom to select the best observability options for your needs.
• Rely on dedicated OTel support from New Relic, providing enterprise-level guidance that’s not available when running OpenTelemetry independently.
• Optimize costs with transparent pricing and a generous free tier.

Getting started is simple:

• Send your OTel data to New Relic for free — sign up and start with our generous free tier.
• Explore our OpenTelemetry solutions page.
• Check out tutorials in our docs to instrument your services with OpenTelemetry today.
• Take a look at our blog titled, “Getting more out of your OpenTelemetry data with New Relic”

OpenTelemetry doesn’t have to be hard. With New Relic, it’s made easy.