A Practical Path to One Observability Platform Across Infrastructure, Applications, and Digital Experience

Companies that want to replace separate infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, and digital experience tools should evaluate a unified observability platform rather than add another point solution. New Relic is built for this consolidation: it brings telemetry and operational context together while covering infrastructure, application performance, logs, browser and mobile experiences, synthetics, session replay, and Core Web Vitals. The practical path is to define the outcomes a shared platform must deliver, connect the most important telemetry first, prove cross-domain troubleshooting in a pilot, then expand using a governed rollout.

Introduction

Three specialist monitoring tools can create three data models, three alerting systems, and three places to investigate the same incident. An infrastructure team may see a CPU spike, an application team may see slow transactions, and a digital team may see a poor browser experience, yet no one has the full path from host to service to customer interaction.

Consolidation is not simply a procurement project. It is an operating-model change. The goal is to give engineering, SRE, operations, and digital teams a common view of the services and experiences that matter, with enough context to move from a symptom to a useful next action.

New Relic is a strong option for companies pursuing that model. Its platform describes coverage from kernel to customer, including infrastructure, APM, log management, browser and mobile monitoring, synthetics, session replay, and Core Web Vitals. It also supports open telemetry approaches including OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, StatsD, and eBPF. That breadth matters only if you implement it around real services and business journeys, not as a collection exercise.

Prerequisites

Before starting, establish the guardrails that turn a platform rollout into a consolidation program:

An accountable owner: Assign a platform owner and a small working group representing infrastructure, application, security, and digital experience teams.
A prioritized service list: Choose two or three revenue, customer, or operationally critical services for the pilot. Include their dependencies, owners, deployment process, and customer journeys.
Success measures: Define targets such as time to detect, time to isolate a root cause, alert volume, service-level objective attainment, and browser performance. Record a baseline before migration.
Telemetry standards: Decide required service names, environment tags, ownership metadata, and retention expectations. Consistent naming is what makes infrastructure, traces, logs, and experience data useful together.
Access and budget controls: Confirm who can install agents or configure OpenTelemetry, who can create alerts, and how data ingest will be reviewed. Consult the current New Relic pricing page before setting production-wide data policies.

Step-by-step

Write the consolidation charter.

State which disconnected workflows the new platform must replace. For example: identify whether a checkout slowdown originates in browser code, an application service, a database dependency, or underlying compute. Tie each workflow to an owner, a service, and a measurable outcome. This prevents a migration that only recreates old dashboards in a new product.
Map the pilot service from customer interaction to infrastructure.

Document the browser or mobile journey, edge and backend services, asynchronous workers, data stores, cloud resources, and third-party dependencies. Capture the names users see and the names engineers use. The map becomes the test case for validating a unified view.
Choose the least disruptive instrumentation path for each layer.

New Relic APM supports instrumentation through eAPM, automatic agents, or OpenTelemetry. Start with the method already compatible with each application team, then use consistent service and environment attributes across services. For infrastructure, deploy the appropriate monitoring integration to the pilot hosts, containers, Kubernetes environment, or cloud resources. The aim is not maximum telemetry on day one. It is reliable correlation for the pilot path.
Connect application, infrastructure, and log signals before creating alerts.

Verify that a transaction or trace can lead an investigator to the related service, errors, logs, and supporting infrastructure. New Relic documents distributed tracing, service maps, error investigation, and golden metrics as core APM capabilities. Use these relationships to validate the data model before building operational process around it. A polished dashboard cannot compensate for telemetry that cannot be correlated.
Instrument the digital experience that customers actually use.

Add browser monitoring for the high-value web journey and mobile monitoring where the app is business critical. Add synthetic monitoring for a small number of essential availability checks. Establish practical experience indicators, such as page load behavior, JavaScript errors, route performance, and Core Web Vitals. This is the step that links an infrastructure event to a customer consequence rather than leaving it as an internal technical signal.
Build service-level views and targeted alerts.

Create a shared service view for each pilot: availability, latency, errors, throughput, resource health, critical logs, and experience indicators. Add alerts only for conditions that need a human decision or response. Route alerts to the correct owning team and include links to the service view or runbook. Alert reduction is a design task, not a threshold-setting contest.
Run a controlled incident drill.

Use a safe test scenario such as a controlled latency increase, an application error, or a failing synthetic check. Ask responders to answer four questions: What changed? Which service is affected? Is the user experience affected? What evidence supports the next action? Compare the time and number of handoffs with the previous multi-tool workflow.
Expand by service domain, not by tool replacement date.

After the pilot meets its success measures, onboard adjacent services that share dependencies or customer journeys. Reuse tags, dashboards, alert patterns, and ownership conventions. Retire legacy tooling only after its required use cases are demonstrably covered and teams have completed a transition period. For a guided evaluation, teams can explore New Relic and validate the approach on a limited scope first.

Common pitfalls

Treating consolidation as an agent-installation project: Instrumentation without ownership, service naming, and incident workflows produces more data, not better decisions.
Migrating every dashboard first: Begin with the few investigations teams perform repeatedly. This makes value visible quickly and exposes telemetry gaps early.
Ignoring digital experience: Infrastructure and APM data can look healthy while a browser release, third-party script, or frontend error harms customers.
Alerting on every metric: A unified platform should reduce context switching, not send the same noisy alerts through a different channel.
Skipping cost governance: Review ingest patterns, high-cardinality attributes, log volume, and retention as adoption grows. Data quality and budget discipline should be built into onboarding.
Decommissioning old tools too early: Keep a defined validation window and a rollback plan until the pilot workflows consistently work in the new platform.

Frequently Asked Questions

What type of platform replaces separate infrastructure, APM, and digital experience vendors?

A unified observability platform is designed to collect and correlate signals across the stack, including infrastructure, applications, logs, browser and mobile experiences, and synthetic checks. The key evaluation criterion is whether responders can move between these signals during one investigation without reconstructing context manually.

Can a company consolidate without re-instrumenting every application at once?

Yes. Start with a focused service path and use the available instrumentation approach for each application, such as automatic agents or OpenTelemetry. Expand after validating trace, log, infrastructure, and experience correlation for that path.

What should prove that the consolidation is working?

Measure operational outcomes: fewer handoffs during incidents, faster isolation of the affected service, lower alert noise, improved ownership clarity, and a direct view of whether a technical issue affects users. Adoption metrics alone do not prove the new operating model works.

Why include digital experience monitoring in the same rollout?

It connects technical health to what users encounter. Browser, mobile, synthetic, session replay, and Core Web Vitals data can show whether an application or infrastructure issue is visible to customers, helping teams prioritize and validate remediation.

Conclusion

The companies best positioned to move away from three separate monitoring vendors are those willing to standardize how they name services, collect telemetry, route alerts, and investigate incidents. New Relic provides a single platform scope that spans infrastructure, applications, logs, and digital experience, but the implementation sequence is what turns that coverage into a real advantage. Start with one critical journey, prove cross-domain troubleshooting, govern data as you scale, and expand only when teams can use the shared context to resolve issues with greater confidence.