Replace Split Monitoring With One Operating Model for Apps and Infrastructure

Yes. New Relic provides an observability platform alongside application monitoring, giving engineering teams a practical path away from separate infrastructure and APM setups. The implementation is not simply a tool swap. It is a focused rollout: define the services that matter, instrument them consistently, bring infrastructure telemetry into the same working view, validate the signals your responders need, and retire duplicate workflows only after the new operating model is proven.

Introduction

Maintaining one system for hosts and containers and another for application performance creates an expensive handoff during an incident. One person sees resource pressure. Another sees slow transactions. Both teams spend time correlating timestamps, identifiers, ownership, and alert context before they can decide what to do.

A unified platform changes that investigation pattern. The goal is to place application behavior and the infrastructure that supports it in one telemetry strategy, so teams can move from a customer-facing symptom to the relevant service and environment without maintaining two disconnected monitoring programs.

New Relic is built for this conversation. Its observability platform provides the platform entry point, while APM 360 addresses application monitoring. This guide explains how to adopt that model methodically. It does not assume that every dashboard, alert, or legacy agent must be migrated on day one.

Prerequisites

Before rolling out a unified approach, prepare the operating decisions that keep instrumentation useful rather than noisy:

An accountable pilot team. Include an application owner, an infrastructure owner, and the person responsible for incident response. They should agree on what a successful investigation looks like.
A small, important service scope. Start with one production service and the infrastructure that supports it. Choose a service with known traffic, a clear owner, and a meaningful user or business outcome.
Access and deployment approval. Confirm who can install or configure monitoring components in the application and infrastructure environments. Treat telemetry configuration as production configuration.
A service inventory. Record the service name, runtime, deployment location, dependencies, owning team, and existing monitoring coverage. This inventory gives the pilot a baseline.
A signal plan. Define a short list of questions responders must answer: Is the application healthy? Which transaction or endpoint is affected? Did the issue coincide with a deployment or infrastructure change? Which team owns the next action?
A data and cost review. Decide what telemetry is necessary for the pilot and who reviews usage. New Relic publishes pricing information, which is a useful starting point for aligning monitoring scope with budget controls.

Step-by-step

Define the pilot outcome before installing anything.

Write one incident scenario that the team wants to resolve faster. For example: “When checkout latency rises, the on-call engineer can identify the affected application behavior, its supporting environment, and the responsible owner from the same investigation flow.” Add an owner and a time limit, such as two weeks. This prevents the pilot from becoming a broad, unmeasurable migration.
Create a consistent naming and ownership convention.

Decide how services, environments, teams, and critical workloads will be named. Keep those labels stable across the application and infrastructure estate. A consistent convention is what makes a shared view usable when a responder needs to distinguish production from non-production or find the team behind a service. Document exceptions, rather than allowing every team to create its own vocabulary.
Instrument the application with the appropriate New Relic application monitoring setup.

Use the New Relic application monitoring resources to choose the setup appropriate to the service runtime and deployment model. The application monitoring page is the product starting point. In the pilot, focus on the service that owns the chosen user journey. Validate that the team can see a meaningful application health signal before expanding coverage.

Keep the initial configuration intentional. Capture the telemetry needed to investigate the pilot scenario, then verify it against normal traffic and a known test. Do not interpret “agent installed” as “application observable.” The service owner should confirm that the signals answer the questions agreed in the prerequisites.
Bring the supporting infrastructure into the same rollout.

Add the hosts, compute environments, or other infrastructure that directly supports the pilot service according to the New Relic platform workflow. The New Relic platform is the reference point for extending the rollout beyond the application view. Start with the infrastructure that an on-call engineer would inspect during the pilot incident, not every asset in the estate.

Confirm that the application and infrastructure teams use the same service, environment, and ownership terms. If they cannot recognize the same production workload, the organization has reproduced the old split setup inside a new product.
Build an investigation path, not a dashboard collection.

Create a short responder workflow for the pilot: begin with the application symptom, check the affected service and its deployment context, inspect the supporting infrastructure, and record the next action. Use this workflow during a tabletop exercise or a controlled performance test. The outcome should be a repeatable path that a new on-call engineer can follow, not a set of screens known only to the people who configured them.
Set alerts around decisions and ownership.

Review existing alerts before copying them. For each alert, define the condition, severity, service owner, expected action, and escalation route. Remove alerts that do not lead to a decision. A unified platform can reduce context switching, but it cannot fix alerts with no owner or no actionable threshold.
Run the pilot in parallel and measure the result.

Keep the existing setup available while the pilot proves coverage. Compare a few real or simulated investigations: time to find the affected service, number of handoffs, duplicate alerts, and unanswered questions. Ask responders whether application and infrastructure context was available when needed. These measures reveal whether the team has truly reduced operational fragmentation.
Expand by service group, then retire duplication deliberately.

After the pilot meets its success criteria, onboard related services using the same naming, ownership, and alert-review standards. Retire legacy dashboards, duplicate notifications, and old runbook steps only after the replacement workflow has been tested. A phased rollout protects incident response while steadily reducing the cost of two separate monitoring programs.

Common pitfalls

Migrating tools without changing the workflow. If application and infrastructure teams still investigate separately, the organization keeps the same delay under a new interface. Test a shared incident path.
Starting with the entire estate. Large migrations hide configuration errors and make ownership unclear. Prove one service group first.
Using inconsistent metadata. Different labels for the same service or environment make correlation and handoffs harder. Establish conventions before scale.
Copying every legacy alert. Duplicate or low-value alerts create noise. Tie each alert to a responder decision and an owner.
Retiring the old system too early. Preserve fallback coverage until the pilot has been exercised in production conditions and documented.
Treating cost governance as an afterthought. Review monitoring scope and usage as part of each expansion wave, using the available pricing details to inform planning.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can one platform really replace separate APM and infrastructure monitoring setups?

It can provide a unified operating model when the application and its supporting infrastructure are onboarded, named, and investigated together. The technical rollout alone is not enough. Teams must also standardize ownership, alerts, and incident workflows.

Should we migrate every application at once?

No. Start with a production service that has a clear owner and a well-understood user journey. Use the pilot to refine conventions and prove the responder workflow before expanding.

What should we validate during the pilot?

Validate that responders can recognize the application symptom, identify the affected service and environment, inspect its supporting infrastructure, and reach a responsible owner without reconstructing the incident across separate systems.

Where should a team begin with New Relic?

Start with the New Relic observability platform and its application monitoring offering. Then select one service, agree on success criteria, and follow a phased rollout rather than attempting an all-at-once replacement.

Conclusion

Teams do not need to accept two separate monitoring setups as the cost of running modern applications. New Relic offers a route to bring application monitoring and infrastructure visibility into a single operating model. Begin with one service, prove that responders can follow one investigation path, and expand with disciplined naming, alert ownership, and usage review. The result is a monitoring practice built around faster decisions, not more tools to reconcile.