Unlock Effortless Kubernetes and Hosts Monitoring with eAPM - Now GA

Monitoring  Kubernetes workloads has historically required  complex manual instrumentation, per-service agents,  and constant lifecycle management This slows down engineering teams, creates blind spots, and makes troubleshooting modern distributed applications harder than it should be. In addition, traditional monitoring solutions can be cumbersome, requiring extensive code changes and manual updates to ensure comprehensive visibility.

New Relic eAPM is now Generally Available — eAPM delivers  automatic, no-code Kubernetes workload and traditional hosts monitoring powered by eBPF technology. With a single, lightweight node-level agent, eAPM instantly discovers and monitors every workload in your cluster—first-party, third-party, or vendor-managed—with full visibility surfaced directly in the New Relic One platform.

No-Code Instrumentation: Automatic Discovery and Instrumentation

Traditionally, achieving full-stack observability required manual instrumentation and frequent agent updates. eAPM addresses this by automatically detecting and instrumenting all services and applications running in your Kubernetes clusters and traditional hosts without any code changes. This significantly streamlines workflow, reduces deployment complexity, and eliminates maintenance overhead.

How we do it:
With a simple Helm command or guided installation, eAPM deploys an efficient eBPF agent directly on each Kubernetes node, automatically capturing and sending telemetry data to New Relic’s APM interface, regardless of the application’s programming language.

Real-Time Debugging: Intelligent Span Sampling

Identifying the root cause of performance issues in complex Kubernetes environments can be a time-consuming and challenging task. eAPM utilizes intelligent span sampling to identify and automatically highlight critical performance issues within application spans. This feature simplifies debugging by quickly surfacing the essential information required to resolve performance bottlenecks.

Practical example:
If a microservice experiences unexpected latency, eAPM surfaces problematic spans immediately, pinpointing bottlenecks and enabling rapid remediation. The result: dramatically lower Mean-Time-To-Recovery (MTTR) and higher service reliability.

AI-Powered Insights: Comprehensive Observability

Traditional monitoring solutions often require manual correlation across multiple data points, which slows incident response. eAPM provides comprehensive AI-driven insights directly within the New Relic APM UI, automatically correlating golden metrics, transaction details, database performance, and Kubernetes cluster performance.

Benefits:

• Instant visibility into the health and performance of your entire Kubernetes (and traditional host) workload.
• Reduced manual effort through automatic correlation of telemetry data.
• Enhanced ability to proactively address potential performance degradation.

Resource-Efficient Operation: Minimal Overhead

Monitoring solutions have traditionally consumed substantial system resources, negatively impacting overall application performance. eAPM operates efficiently at the kernel level using eBPF technology, ensuring low CPU and memory overhead, allowing your applications to run optimally without additional performance penalties.

Impact:
Resource optimization enables your Kubernetes clusters to perform at their best, freeing up valuable resources for critical business workloads rather than dedicating them to monitoring overhead.

Seamless Transition to Full APM: Flexibility and Comprehensive Coverage

Many eBPF-based monitoring solutions often lock users into limited monitoring capabilities, making transitions cumbersome. New Relic’s eAPM allows for seamless upgrading to full APM agents when deeper monitoring insights, such as distributed tracing, are required. This seamless transition ensures continuous observability, without disruption or the need to recreate dashboards and alerts.

Result:
Smooth operational continuity, providing the flexibility to scale your observability solutions according to evolving business needs.

Getting Started

Deploying eAPM to your Kubernetes cluster is straightforward with New Relic’s guided installation. To deploy eAPM:

1.     Ensure your Kubernetes nodes are running a Linux kernel version 4.14 or higher.

2.     Use the guided installation or run a Helm command to install the eBPF agent on each node.

3.     Navigate to the New Relic One platform and navigate to APM and Services [one.newrelic.com> APM > Services] to view your auto-discovered services and performance data.

From there, you can evaluate which services may benefit from full APM instrumentation and transition seamlessly.

Explore More New Relic eBPF-Powered Capabilities

As you begin adopting eAPM, you can also explore additional eBPF-powered capabilities New Relic has been developing to give engineers even deeper visibility into how applications behave at the kernel and network level. For example, upcoming enhancements around network-level telemetry insights—such as visibility into TCP behavior, DNS lookups, and service-to-service communication patterns—are designed to help teams troubleshoot latency, connection failures, and complex performance issues even faster.

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