From shadow to insights: Observe your AI footprint with New Relic Catalogs

AI is everywhere. Companies are racing to leverage it for every possible business use case, but as the footprint of AI grows, so does the complexity of managing it. When AI is integrated into every corner of your systems, maintaining oversight becomes a massive hurdle—a challenge known as Shadow AI. To navigate this, you need more than raw telemetry. You need a centralized source of truth.

Catalogs: Your curated source of truth

New Relic Catalogs move beyond fragmented data to provide a curated, opinionated inventory that maps ownership, governance, dependencies, and operational context in one place. It’s designed to ensure your entire ecosystem is organized and focused on high-value insights.

Today, we are enhancing the Applications Catalog view to highlight every service where we’ve detected an AI footprint. By surfacing these insights as contextual metadata directly within your existing workflow, we’re providing the essential first step in your AI compliance and awareness journey.

1. Bring Shadow AI into the light

The rapid adoption of AI often leads to unmanaged tools and components, creating significant compliance and security risks. New Relic automatically detects AI usage without manual configuration, providing immediate visibility.

By bringing Shadow AI out of the shadows, you can:

• Identify unknown AI components that create security exposure.
• Bridge the accountability gap by instantly identifying the teams responsible for these assets.
• Monitor unsanctioned use of AI tools or features within SaaS apps.
• Address custom assets that pose a risk to your security posture.

2. Bridge the ownership gap with New Relic Teams

Discovery is only half the battle; the real value lies in taking action. Once an AI footprint is detected—especially an unsanctioned "Shadow AI" tool—the next question is always: Who is responsible for this?

By surfacing New Relic Teams directly within New Relic Catalogs, we’ve closed the gap between discovery and action. You can instantly identify the team behind any AI-enabled service and access their preferred communication channels—like Slack, email, or on-call rotations—in a single click. We’ve eliminated the need to hunt through stale spreadsheets or internal wikis. Now, with ownership data living right alongside AI metadata, you can align with the right stakeholders in seconds to ensure security and architectural standards are met.

3. Close the compliance gap with AI governance

As emerging regulatory requirements like the EU AI Act come into effect, having a clear understanding of your AI footprint is essential. To move from simple awareness to active alignment with company standards, you can now leverage New Relic Scorecards as contextual data to track compliance.

These governance signals allow you to identify at a glance which services meet your AI rules and which require immediate attention—all within a single, unified table. By leveraging existing application telemetry, you can effortlessly demonstrate AI usage for regulatory audits, ensuring you close the compliance gap for good. 

4. A seamless journey: From discovery to deep-dive

While New Relic Catalogs provides the curated, high-level context needed to manage your system, it is designed to be your go-to starting point rather than the final destination. If a service using AI requires a deeper dive, you can seamlessly navigate from the Applications Catalog to its entity overview page to explore granular technical details and access the specialized tools required for your AI journey.

The verdict: A unified approach to AI

For developers and SREs, fragmentation and knowledge silos across different tools slow down workflows. The Applications Catalog acts as a central system of record, mapping AI components to services to identify usage patterns, dependencies, and data flows in real-time. 

This workflow effectively closes the loop on the AI challenge through four core pillars:

1. Detect: Automatically surface hidden AI footprints across your entire digital estate without manual configuration.
2. Connect: Instantly identify which team owns an AI-enabled service and reach them through their preferred communication channels (Slack, email, or on-call).
3. Prevent: Leverage compliance scorecards as governance signals to identify and close security gaps before they become liabilities.
4. Analyze: Use New Relic Catalogs as the definitive, curated entry point for deeper technical experiences.

By consolidating disparate data into a single, curated inventory, New Relic Catalogs empower you to accelerate discovery, strengthen security, and boost engineering productivity in the age of AI.