How to Keep a Secure Environment with New Relic: Your Observability Shield

In today's fast-paced digital world providing an exceptional digital experience to our customers has become a must, with most of our interactions and business being hosted online. However, this change has come with some difficulties, since all our business information  is stored online there has also been a spike in criminals who want to get profit out of stealing said information or preventing business operations. Just in 2024, the FBI has reported over $16.6 billion in losses related to cybercrime, and this value is only increasing year over year making that an "observable" environment must also be a "secure" one. However, by instrumenting your systems with New Relic, you're not just gaining performance insights—you're gaining control over your security posture. This guide outlines key New Relic features and best practices to help you keep your environment secure and compliant allowing you to be prepared for this digital world.

Security RX: Make Security a Team Sport

New Relic Security RX (Remediation Explorer) is a unified security solution built directly into the New Relic observability platform that helps engineers contextualize, prioritize, and remediate security vulnerabilities across the entire stack. It effectively bridges the gap between development, operations, and security teams (DevSecOps) by merging security data with performance metrics. Moreover, you don’t need any further instrumentation since all the information monitored is already gathered thanks to our APM and infrastructure agents out of the box.

How to Use Security RX for Proactive Security

Security RX works by collecting vulnerability data from multiple sources and presenting it in the context of your running applications, infrastructure, and cloud environment.

1. Unified Data Ingestion (Zero-Config & Open Ecosystem)

Security RX starts collecting data immediately with zero-configuration using your existing New Relic APM and Infrastructure agents.

• Native Detection: APM agents perform Continuous Runtime Software Composition Analysis (SCA) to instantly detect Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) in application dependencies (like open-source libraries). Infrastructure agents check for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in your hosts and cloud posture (e.g., CIS benchmarks).
• External Integration: It uses an open ecosystem to import signals from your existing security tools, allowing you to centralize vulnerability data from:
  • Application Security Tools: Snyk, GitHub Dependabot.
  • Cloud Security Tools: AWS Security Hub, Lacework.
  • Custom Sources: Use the Security Data API to pull in data from any unsupported tool.

2. Prioritization and Contextualization

The core value of Security RX is its ability to prioritize risks based on real-world impact, not just severity scores.

• Risk-Based Prioritization: It correlates vulnerability data with the New Relic Entity Graph (the map of your services and infrastructure) and operational data. This helps answer: "Is this vulnerable library actually being called in production?" It prioritizes risks based on factors like:
  • Exploits in the Wild: Whether an active exploit or ransomware is known to target the vulnerability.
  • Business Criticality: The importance of the application or service affected.
• Vulnerability Dashboard: Navigate to the Security RX Overview page in New Relic One to see a single, unified view of all vulnerabilities, filtered by priority, severity, type, and affected entities.

3. Accelerated Remediation Workflows

Security RX provides the tools needed to rapidly fix identified issues and embed security into the development lifecycle.

• Triage and Assign: You can easily link vulnerabilities to specific organizations, teams, or services, and assign issues directly to engineers within the New Relic platform, creating personalized worklists.

• Alerting: Set up notifications via Slack or webhooks to instantly alert teams when new, critical vulnerabilities are introduced into the codebase. 

Key Benefits of Security RX 

Proactive Data and Privacy Protection

The most critical step in securing your environment is controlling the data your New Relic agents send.

Secure Log and Data Collection

• Log Obfuscation: Use New Relic Log Management to automatically obscure or manually create Obfuscation Rules using regular expressions (regex). You can choose to Mask or Hash sensitive data like PII to maintain utility without compromising privacy.

• Default Filtering: Agents disable the collection of HTTP request parameters by default and obfuscate sensible information from SQL statements (like usernames or credit cards), adding a layer of protection before data leaves your environment.

Implement Strong Access and Control Measures

Controlling who has access to your data and how agents are deployed is foundational to a secure environment.

• User Access Management: New Relic counts with a SAML Single Sign-On (SSO) for centralized authentication and configuring granular user access levels. This makes configure rules and groups to assign permissions to users very easy. In order to keep your environment as secure as possible make sure your organization enforces the Principle of Least Privilege.
• Agent Control: Deploy and configure agents using Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools like Terraform. This prevents manual errors, ensures configuration consistency (like HSM), and provides traceability for all changes. Moreover, new relic provides an easy to use terraform integration which makes the instrumentation of multiple applications easier.
• Data Encryption: Rest easy knowing your data is secured at every stage. All data in transit uses TLS encryption, and all data stored in the New Relic database is secured with AES-256 encryption at rest.

🚀 Call to Action: Take the Next Step to DevSecOps

The threat landscape is complex, and relying on separate security and observability tools creates friction, delays, and risk. New Relic Security RX is designed to break down those barriers and integrate security into your engineering workflow.

Why Wait? Get Started with Security RX Today:

1. Stop Tool Juggling: Unify vulnerability management with your performance monitoring. New Relic is an all-in-one platform—use it as your single source of truth for both health and security.
2. Accelerate Velocity, Securely: using security RX means you can identify and fix risks during development, not after a breach. Secure code ships faster, period.

Log in to New Relic now and navigate to the Security RX section to see your first application vulnerabilities. Start building security into your DNA!