Connect External Data for Complete Insight, Without the Ingestion Tax
Today, we are excited to announce the General Availability of New Relic Lens—a powerful data federation capability designed to simplify and accelerate data discovery and analysis across multiple environments. With New Relic Lens, you can easily connect your observability data directly to your business outcomes and transform that data into actionable insights, all without paying for extra data ingestion.
What is New Relic Lens?
New Relic Lens allows you to connect and query multiple external data sources—like Snowflake, Google Sheets, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and more—using standard SQL, all from within the New Relic UI. Users can combine, analyze, and correlate telemetry and non-telemetry (business) data using sophisticated cross-database JOINs without ingesting the external data, effectively breaking down organizational data silos.
Query your metadata on your uses stored in Snowflake:
SELECT userId, name, company FROM snowflake.users.user_metadata
Query New Relic data through Lens:
SELECT enduser.id FROM telemetry.PageView
Join your page view data with metadata from Snowflake to group the data by company
SELECT sf.company, COUNT(*)
FROM telemetry.PageView nr
JOIN snowflake.users.user_metadata sf ON nr.enduser.id = sf.userId
GROUP BY sf.company
Why Lens?
If you are an engineering leader, product manager, or IT Ops lead, this scenario probably sounds familiar: You want to tie system performance (like checkout latency) to business metrics (like shopping cart revenue), but that business data lives in a separate database like Snowflake.
Traditionally, integrating this data meant paying a "double tax" on ingestion: you paid once to store the data in your database, and you paid again to ingest it into your observability platform just to visualize it. Alternatively, you resorted to chaotic workarounds, manually exporting data into separate BI tools. New Relic Lens changes the game by querying the data exactly where it lives.
Example of Lens used to query APM telemetry and sales databases. Screenshot shows correlation and casual effect of system performance and revenue. One of many use cases for Lens.
Key Features & Capabilities
- Zero-Ingestion Connectors: Query external databases directly without duplicating or persistently storing raw data within New Relic. Seamlessly access data that includes Google Sheets, Iceberg, Snowflake, Postgres, MySQL, Redshift, Prometheus, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, AWS CloudWatch, ClickHouse, SQL Server, Databricks (Azure) with more being added.
- Cross-Database JOINs in SQL: Uniquely combine datasets from entirely different external databases into a single query and visualization widget. Write complex queries joining all of your data in standard SQL, going beyond traditional NRQL boundaries.
- Materialized Views: Accelerate dashboard performance and reduce external compute costs by storing precomputed query results in Iceberg-backed databases. This is especially effective for complex, high-volume datasets and results in only minimal data ingestion fees.
- Unified Data View: Embed external business metrics alongside Application, AI, and Infrastructure telemetry natively within Dashboards and the new New Relic Notebooks feature to gain immediate, actionable context.
- Ephemeral Caching for Security: Security is built-in. Data is queried on demand and only briefly cached—for about a minute—to render in the UI. We do not ingest, index, or store your raw business data in New Relic, except when you explicitly choose to use Materialized Views.
Transforming Your Workflows
New Relic Lens empowers you to perform deep analysis that previously took hours of manual correlation. Here is how it transforms your workflows:
- Align System Performance with Revenue: Compare New Relic infrastructure metrics directly with budget or revenue data stored in Snowflake, placing it all on the same dashboard to instantly see the financial impact of downtime or latency.
- Cross-Database Correlation: Track usage or incidents by combining data from disparate sources, such as correlating support tickets in Jira with infrastructure provisioning data natively inside New Relic.
- Optimize Dashboard Performance and Costs: Use Materialized Views for high-traffic executive dashboards to prevent repeated, expensive compute calls on your source database while ensuring visualizations load instantly.
Get Started Today
It's time to break down the barriers between your databases and analyze your aggregated data in a single, unified observability platform. Stop double ingesting and start saving.
New Relic Lens is available to all paid customers. By default, access is restricted to users with the 'organization_manager' role. Administrators can easily adjust these permissions or configure Fine-Grained Access (FGA) for connectors to grant access to other team members as needed.
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