How New Relic Catalogs improves developer productivity

Has this happened to you?

A newly hired on-call engineer, receives an alert at 2AM that the company’s e-commerce platform is experiencing performance issues. After clicking on the service dashboard he realizes the codebase has multiple components and that he is unfamiliar with many of the third-party services being used. 

He does not want to risk breaking code or a third-party integration and needs help, however, he doesn't know who to call or where to find documentation so he sends out a Slack message to developers in his organization and waits for a response. His ineffective and time-consuming plea for help significantly delays resolution.

Why Catalogs matter more than ever

Engineering teams are facing several pain points today:

• Relevant knowledge is siloed in Confluence pages, Slack threads, or in someone’s head.
• Onboarding new engineers takes too long due to lack of system clarity.
• Incident response suffers because teams can’t easily trace ownership or dependency chains.
• Compliance and audits become a nightmare without visibility into system inventory and changes.

Catalogs address all of these by making metadata discoverable, relational, and actionable.

An intelligent approach to finding information

The New Relic Catalogs automatically discovers and inventories services and components in a customer's digital environment, establishing a central system of record with crucial context for each service. This context encompasses documentation, ownership, performance, reliability, topology, and security data. By eliminating knowledge silos and context switching, the catalog significantly enhances engineering productivity by reducing the time spent searching for contextual information.

Use cases that show the real power of Catalogs

1. Instant ownership and service discovery

Instead of asking around, engineers can search the Catalog to instantly find:

• Who owns this service?
• How to contact them?
• What other services does it depend on?

Example: During an incident involving an API timeout, an SRE quickly identifies the owning team, relevant runbooks, and downstream services — all from the Catalog, without leaving the observability platform. Time to resolution is cut in half.

2. Contextual Debugging and Triaging

Traditional observability tools surface what is happening — error spikes, latency increases, failed deployments. But they often lack the context to answer why it's happening, who owns it, and what else might be affected.

Catalogs close that gap. Because they’re enriched with real-time telemetry and built into the New Relic platform, Catalogs provide an immediate, 360-degree view of any service or component. This transforms triage from a detective hunt into a guided investigation.

Example: When something is broken, the Catalog automatically surfaces related services, owners, recent deployments, and other dependencies.

3. Accelerated Developer Onboarding

New hires no longer need a week of tribal knowledge downloads. They can explore the Catalog to see:

• What services their team owns
• Their dependencies
• How those services are built and deployed
• Who to ask when things go wrong

Example: A new backend engineer joins and is productive within days by navigating the Catalog to trace service flows, access dashboards, and understand architectural context — all without pinging a single coworker.

4. Change Risk Assessment

Before rolling out a change, teams can analyze the blast radius using service dependencies. Catalogs are also integrated with Maps, so you can visualize these dependencies in a graph.

Example: Before a breaking schema change, a developer uses the Catalog to identify downstream consumers and proactively notify them — avoiding outages and postmortems.

5. Audit & Compliance Readiness

Catalogs provide up-to-date inventories, configurations, and team mappings, enabling easy evidence collection for audits or compliance frameworks. It also integrates Scorecards data to have a great overview of how entities are performing against company best practices and rules.

Example: You can gain a centralized view of your team's entities and their adherence to organizational best practice guidelines. This allows for proactive intervention when entities are not compliant.

6. Knowledge Sharing Through Linked Documentation and Runbooks

Catalogs don’t just map systems — they become the hub for operational knowledge. Teams can associate services with key documents, architectural diagrams, onboarding guides, and runbooks — keeping critical knowledge where it’s needed most.

Example: During an after-hours incident, an on-call engineer encounters a failure in a service they didn’t build. Instead of hunting through Confluence or Google Drive, they access the service in the Catalog and immediately find a linked runbook detailing mitigation steps. The issue is resolved without escalation.

Key features 

• Unified view: Catalogs are integrated with various capabilities such as Teams, Scorecards, Maps and Repositories into a single cohesive interface. This displays high-value entity types with detailed metadata including golden metrics and insights to provide a deeper understanding of system status.
• Personalized experience: Catalogs allows users to customize their view to focus on the most relevant content. This helps users to streamline workflows and enhance productivity.
• Relationships mapping: Catalogs automatically surface relationships between services, resources, code repositories, teams, and others giving users clear insight into how everything is connected. This is essential for impact analysis, debugging, and architectural planning.
• Real-time context via telemetry data: Catalogs entries are enriched with live telemetry data so users can pivot from metadata to action instantly.
• Seamless integration: Catalogs connects users with other New Relic capabilities to allow them to explore data in depth and gain a thorough understanding of entities.
• Ownership: Catalogs displays the entity ownership information in the Teams column. Simply hover over the Teams link for more information.
• Scorecards: Catalogs are integrated with Scorecards to show how your entities are performing against company defined best practices.
• Auto-discovery.  New services are automatically added and updated in the catalog view eliminating manual updates and orphan entities. 

Catalogs Available

Applications Catalog

The Applications Catalog provides a unified, single-pane view that enhances observability and simplifies the management of key entities across your organization. By consolidating APM Services, OpenTelemetry Services, Browser, and Mobile entities into one centralized interface, it empowers teams to make informed decisions, streamline operations, and collaborate more effectively.

Repositories Catalog

The New Relic Service Architecture Intelligence integration with GitHub enables you to seamlessly import key data—including teams, team members, repositories, and pull request (PR) metadata—directly from your GitHub account into New Relic. This data powers the Repositories Catalog, making it easy to visualize repositories, identify owning teams, and link connected services. 

Infrastructure Catalog

Auto-discovery allows New Relic to automatically ingest entities and its key metadata —such as compute instances, clusters, databases, networking components, and ownership details, plus the relationships between them. This information populates the Infrastructure Catalog, providing a clear, centralized view of your infrastructure landscape. By mapping services to the infrastructure they run on, this integration simplifies discovery, accelerates troubleshooting, and enhances visibility for engineering and operations teams.

Available as part of Advanced Compute Usage

New Relic Catalogs can be accessed as part of New Relic’s Advanced Compute innovations. This means you are measured and billed based on usage which optimizes your spend and eliminates the need for static license fees.

Conclusion

For large development organizations facing cognitive overload from complex service architectures and increased responsibilities, New Relic Catalogs offers the capability to centralize and consolidate essential context, enabling engineers and developers to easily discover necessary information for daily tasks. This reduces time spent searching for information and context switching, leading to less error-prone and faster task completion. 

The result is reduced cognitive load, sharper insights, and stronger individual and business performance—driving greater productivity across the organization.