New Relic Advance 2026

We have crossed the threshold into a new era of software engineering. For decades, the bottleneck of digital transformation was the speed at which a human could write, test, and deploy code. Today, that bottleneck has been shattered.

Driven by the rise of generative AI and autonomous coding assistants, software development is accelerating at a pace that far exceeds human management capabilities. IDC predicts that by the end of this year, over 500 million new applications will have been built—a staggering volume that matches the total output of the previous 40 years combined.

However, this explosion of code comes with a heavy price: a "complexity tax" that is pushing modern architectures beyond the limit of human cognitive capacity. Legacy observability, built for a world of static dashboards and rigid automation and workflows, is failing to keep up with the explosion of AI-generated software we are experiencing just in the last couple of months. Our 2026 AI Impact Report reveals a sobering reality: despite having more data than ever, engineers are still trapped in a cycle of manual firefighting, losing up to 33% of their work week to operational toil.  

At New Relic Advance 2026, we are announcing the evolution of Intelligent Observability. We believe that to thrive in the AI era, observability must evolve into a proactive, intelligent partner that interprets outcomes, highlights what matters and takes action on our behalf. We call this Observability Beyond Human Scale. It is no longer enough to simply monitor system performance, you must also drive business uptime. Success in this high-velocity environment requires powerful collaboration between talented people and an intelligent platform that turns overwhelming telemetry into instant understanding and autonomous action. By moving beyond passive assistance to a strategy of intelligent automation, New Relic empowers enterprises to close the gap between technical data and business reality.

Observability as a business driver

For too long, a wall has existed between engineering metrics and business reality. A dashboard might show you all green lights for CPU and memory, while in reality your business is losing millions in revenue due to a silent failure in a third-party checkout API. At New Relic Advance, we are demonstrating how we can help you tear that wall down.

Observability is no longer a technical silo, it is a critical business conversation. By providing a platform that natively aligns technical performance with financial outcomes and customer experience, we are shifting the focus from "Is the system up?" to "Is the business thriving?"

Bridge the gap with Intelligent Workloads

Modern architectures are too ephemeral and complex for manual, static monitoring. To manage them, you need a system that understands context. Intelligent Workloads automate the discovery and mapping of complex dependencies across your entire stack. Using Intelligent Workloads, New Relic automatically identifies every service, database, and infrastructure component involved in a critical digital journey and its impact on the business bottom line.

By aligning these workloads with business KPIs, leaders can move beyond "red or green" indicators. Instead of seeing a generic latency spike, you can now quantify the direct impact on revenue, such as the number of abandoned carts or failed transactions. This context-aware observability allows you to resolve incidents faster and prioritize your engineering efforts based on what truly moves the needle for the business.

Precision monitoring for modern architectures: Micro front-ends

Digital experience is where most users make their first and often lasting impressions of your company. Failing here directly erodes the bottom line faster than any other area. However, in the era of micro front-end (MFE) architectures, identifying the root cause of a glitch is notoriously difficult. When a web application is broken into dozens of smaller components managed by different teams, where does the fault lie?

New Relic has enhanced its Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) solution to provide granular visibility for every component of your MFE architecture. You can now collect metrics on performance timing, errors, and renders for individual fragments. By understanding the upstream and downstream effects of every component, you can ensure that a minor UI error doesn't escalate into a major customer churn event.

Unified insights via New Relic Lens

To truly understand the business impact of a technical issue, you often need data that lives outside your telemetry, which for example could be data residing in Snowflake, Postgres, or other internal SQL databases. Historically, this meant expensive data re-ingestion or disjointed manual correlation.

New Relic Lens changes the game. It allows users to connect to and query multiple external data sources directly from within the New Relic UI. By performing sophisticated cross-database joins, you can correlate application performance with product costs or customer loyalty data in real-time. It is the ultimate tool for "Monitoring What Matters," providing a complete, 360-degree view that connects external business intelligence with your internal application health.

Augmenting your workforce

As software complexity accelerates beyond human scale, the traditional "dashboard-and-page" model has reached its breaking point. In this high-velocity environment, observability can no longer be a passive observer of problems, it must embrace the new role of being an active participant in solving them. At New Relic Advance, we are introducing a fundamental evolution in intelligent automation—moving from basic assistance to Agentic AIOps. We are empowering teams to stop firefighting and start leading by deploying autonomous teammates that cut through the noise, perform deep diagnostics, and automate the path to resolution.

SRE Agent: Your Always-on teammate

 Complete visibility is not enough. To keep up we need observability that takes action. The standout innovation of this era is the New Relic SRE Agent. Unlike traditional AI assistants that simply answer questions, the SRE Agent is a specialized, agentic worker designed to help manage the entire incident lifecycle. Anchored in the ground truth of your live telemetry, it performs full-stack diagnostics across your services and infrastructure—often identifying the root cause of any errors and recommending a fix before an engineer even acknowledges the alert.

The SRE Agent isn’t just a black box, it is your collaborative partner. Through deep integrations with Slack and Zoom, it joins your triage rooms to capture human context while simultaneously powering automated fact-finding and impact assessments. By maintaining a unified, evolving timeline of events, the SRE Agent ensures your team is always working from the most accurate data, reducing Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and protecting your business uptime.

A more accurate analysis with Intelligent RCA (iRCA)

To solve problems at scale, AI needs more than just a large language model, it needs a map. Intelligent Root Cause Analysis (iRCA) provides that map by automatically searching your entity's topology graph and scoring it using probabilistic causal models.

Instead of leaving engineers to guess why an alert fired, iRCA applies a path-based ranking algorithm to narrow down the problem space in seconds. This allows the SRE Agent to perform its most time-consuming task of separating signal from noise by using high-confidence, deterministic methodologies. Whether the issue lies in a misconfigured Kubernetes pod, a locked database, or a security vulnerability, iRCA provides the domain-specific understanding required to solve issues quickly.

Proactive protection: Performance Risks Inbox

The most efficient incident is the one that never happens. Performance Risks Inbox shifts your team from reactive monitoring to proactive optimization. By scanning your environment for "silent killers," such as critical coding anti-patterns like N+1 queries, slow SQL queries and excessive database queries, the platform alerts you to vulnerabilities before they cascade into outages.

Paired with Smart Alerts, which use AI-strengthened anomaly detection to reduce noise and improve signal quality, you gain a high-integrity alerting engine that only interrupts your flow when it truly matters. This suite of AIOps capabilities lays the groundwork for a truly autonomous enterprise, ensuring your engineers spend less time in war rooms and more time building the future.

The most significant barrier to AI-driven automation has historically been the "talent wall" of obtaining the specialized coding expertise required to build and govern custom agents. The New Relic Agentic Platform shatters this barrier. It is a first-of-its-kind, enterprise-grade solution that allows SREs, DevOps engineers, and even technical product managers to build, deploy, and manage custom AI agents without writing a single line of code.

Using an intuitive, drag-and-drop builder, domain experts can capture their unique institutional knowledge and transform it into an autonomous digital workforce. These agents move beyond passive observation to active task execution, handling everything from complex investigations to automated remediations. With built-in governance, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and a specialized evaluation engine to test agent performance, you can deploy custom automation with the confidence that your agents are making accurate, compliant decisions 24/7.

Break free from lock-in with OpenTelemetry hybrid agents

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is the future of standardized telemetry, yet many enterprises hesitate to adopt it due to the "migration tax," the massive effort required to refactor code and recreate existing dashboards. We are removing that friction with APM hybrid agents.

This innovation provides a best-of-both-worlds bridge. By embedding OTel API compatibility directly into our existing, high-performance language agents, we allow you to modernize your stack at your own pace. You can start writing new code using open standards today while maintaining absolute backward compatibility with your existing New Relic dashboards and alerts. Only New Relic unifies these capabilities into a single, intelligent agent that handles both proprietary and open data streams natively, ensuring that your traces remain intact even in complex, fragmented environments.

End-to-end visibility across ecosystems

As your AI stack grows to include a variety of third-party agents and tools, maintaining a "single pane of glass" becomes more difficult. New Relic now supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP), acting as a central hub for your entire agentic ecosystem. By integrating any AI agent or tool you choose, whether it’s a specialized security bot or a Kubernetes optimizer, you gain a unified view across your application stack, AI layers, and underlying infrastructure. This ensures that the full value of your observability data is accessible wherever your teams are working, reinforcing New Relic as the open foundation for the next generation of software.

Maximizing ROI in a high-telemetry world

In an era where AI-driven development is generating a staggering volume of data, the spiraling cost of ingesting, storing, and managing telemetry, or the "observability tax," can quickly become a barrier to innovation. At New Relic Advance, we are redefining the economics of observability with Cloud Cost Intelligence. We believe that deep visibility should not come with deep financial or operational burdens. By introducing intelligent data management and federated architectures, we are empowering organizations to scale their observability 10x while simultaneously reducing their Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Insights without the ingestion tax

The traditional log management model, whereby every byte must be sent to a centralized cloud to be useful, is no longer sustainable for modern enterprises. Federated Logs break this cycle by enabling you to query logs directly at their source, such as Amazon S3, without the need for custom schemas or expensive re-ingestion. By utilizing the Pipeline Control Gateway (PCG), your raw data stays securely within your own local environment.

New Relic processes and formats these logs on the fly, allowing your engineers to access granular, in-context insights within the same unified UI they use for the rest of the stack. This doesn't just reduce operational expenses, it accelerates troubleshooting by eliminating manual toil and ensuring you meet strict data residency mandates without sacrificing 100% visibility.

Take command of your data with Pipeline Control

Not all telemetry is created equal. Often, a significant portion of an observability bill is driven by low-value, repetitive data, like debug-level logs from a stable production environment or redundant health check metrics. Pipeline Control gives you the power to actively manage your data spend by acting as an intelligent traffic controller for your telemetry.

Through a centralized, no-code interface, you can create rules to filter, mask, and sample data before it is ingested. This ensures you only pay for high-value data that actually helps you solve problems. Whether you’re dropping noisy debug logs or standardizing environment tags across a fragmented fleet, Pipeline Control puts you in the driver’s seat of your data budget, turning observability from an unpredictable expense into a managed, high-ROI business asset.

Consolidation for compounding value

The challenge of managing complexity in your environment is often exacerbated by tool sprawl. Maintaining a collection of disconnected point solutions, e.g., one for logs, another for infrastructure, and a third for AI monitoring, creates fragmentation overhead that drains both time and money. New Relic is built to simplify this burden.

By consolidating your toolset onto our single, intelligent observability platform, you achieve lower ownership costs through a transparent, usage-based pricing model. As your environment scales, the value of the platform compounds: the more data you connect, the more accurate our SRE Agent and iRCA become, leading to even faster resolution times and more prevented outages. We are moving the needle from system uptime to business uptime, ensuring that your observability investment directly protects your revenue and empowers your team to focus on building, not firefighting.

Your strategic command center for the AI era

The innovations unveiled at New Relic Advance 2026 mark a definitive end to the era of passive monitoring. As AI pushes software development beyond human scale, the businesses that thrive will be those that transition from simply observing problems to autonomously solving them.

By unifying these four strategic investments: business alignment, intelligent automation, open extensibility, and economic efficiency, New Relic has transformed the observability platform into a strategic command center. We are no longer just reporting on system health, we are providing the high-confidence intelligence required to protect revenue, reclaim engineering productivity, and ensure business continuity in an increasingly complex world.

According to our 2026 AI Impact Report, organizations leveraging these intelligent capabilities are already seeing a 25% faster incident resolution time and a significant reduction in operational toil. This is the power of Observability Beyond Human Scale. It is the realization of a future where engineers lead strategy, business leaders see the direct impact of every deployment, and an intelligent platform filters out the noise.

In a world of sprawling complexity across clouds and microservices, New Relic turns that complexity into understanding and action. We aren't just helping you keep the lights on, we are empowering you to out-innovate the competition with the industry's most trusted, open, and intelligent observability platform.

Are you ready to operate beyond human scale? We encourage you to join us for New Relic Advance 2026! You can also get started now or schedule a demo to see how we can help you protect your revenue and empower your engineering teams.