Get all the insights with none of the hassle with New Relic APM + OpenTelemetry Convergence

Cloud-native teams seek flexibility without compromising visibility, and OpenTelemetry (OTel) has rapidly emerged as the open standard for instrumenting modern applications. Yet the rise of OTel has also raised a new challenge: managing its inherent complexity. OTel usually requires significant engineering effort for setup and configuration, but what if you could have a single great APM experience regardless of whether your data comes from New Relic agents or OTel instrumentation..

Today, we're announcing the general availability of New Relic's APM + OpenTelemetry Convergence—a powerful capability to bring New Relic best-in-class APM experience to OTel data sources. But how does it work? When you send standard OTel data to New Relic, we use our powerful intelligent platform to produce a normalized copy of the data conforming to New Relic’s APM semantic conventions resulting in:

• Normalize data lights up the standard New Relic APM UI experience and enables standard querying of APM data and golden metrics across all of your applications, regardless of whether they’re instrumented with New Relic, or OTel. No longer does adopting OTel mean accepting a compromised APM solution.
• Non-destructive, automated process, you’ll always have access to your unadulterated OTel source data.
• No extra instrumentation, vendor tooling, or obscure configuration is required. Simply send data conforming to OpenTelemetry’s semantic conventions to New Relic’s OTLP endpoint.

This processing works with the various versions of OTel semantic conventions. As you migrate and upgrade instrumentation in a maturing OpenTelemetry landscape, the APM experience will continue to work seamlessly, without any need to update dashboards or alert conditions written against the New Relic APM semantic conventions. This simplifies migration efforts between New Relic agents and OpenTelemetry, or vice versa.

Correlate OTel + APM data across a unified platform

Gone are the days of fragmented visibility. New Relic now treats OTel  signals (metrics, traces, and logs) as first-class citizens, enabling users to seamlessly monitor and troubleshoot applications instrumented with OpenTelemetry alongside traditional APM agents.

• Automatically normalizes OTel data data across telemetry sources to see all your telemetry in one place—no matter how you collect data, it ends up in a single pane of glass.
• Visualize dependencies and trace requests across services, same user experience, whether data is from open-source or proprietary agents.
• Use Errors Inbox, Lookout, and dashboards across both sources without separate workflows.

Scale your observability practice—without vendor lock-in.

Many organizations are adopting OpenTelemetry to reduce dependency on proprietary tools and unify instrumentation practices across teams. New Relic meets you where you are, offering:

• 100% native OTLP support with no proprietary agent/SDK requirements.
• Support for all major OpenTelemetry languages—Java, .NET, Go, Node.js, Python, and more.
• Out-of-the-box dashboards and curated views for OpenTelemetry signals—no configuration required.

Built-in flexibility to optimize every environment

OpenTelemetry is powerful, but its components vary in maturity across languages. New Relic helps you choose what works best for your environment:

• Mix and match New Relic agents and OpenTelemetry SDKs.
• Utilize New Relic's secure and scalable backend to process OTel data.
• Integrate New Relic APM, infrastructure, and browser monitoring with OTel for comprehensive visibility.

Enterprise-grade analytics, security, and AI-powered troubleshooting

What sets New Relic apart isn't just ingesting OpenTelemetry data; it's what you can do with it.

• Enterprise-ready platform: RBAC, compliance (HIPAA, FedRAMP, ISO27001), and massive scalability.
• AI-powered analysis: Spot anomalies with Lookout, resolve incidents faster with Errors Inbox, and build dynamic dashboards.
• Proactive issue detection: Monitor key metrics and configure alerts based on OTel data streams.

How to get started

New Relic knows that creating the best observability backend for OpenTelemetry data is a strategic game-changer. This is why we are releasing this capability as a part of our transparent consumption pricing. Only pay for what you use, no additional SKUs required. 

Whether you're starting from scratch or expanding OpenTelemetry adoption, New Relic makes onboarding easy. Here's how:

1. Instrument your services with OpenTelemetry agents/SDKs or the OpenTelemetry Collector.
2. Send your data to NewRelic's OTLP endpoint.
3. Use curated dashboards or create custom visualizations to analyze and act on your data.

Want a more detailed guide? Check out our OpenTelemetry + New Relic integration documentation.