Evolution of intelligent automation enables enterprises to move beyond observing problems towards autonomously solving them

SRE Agent augments a workforce, freeing up engineers to focus on high-value strategic decisions instead of toil

Innovations create future-proof incident response toolset where engineers lead strategy, make key decisions, and validate solutions in powerful collaboration with AI

New Relic, the Intelligent Observability company, today announced a series of innovations that operationalize AI across the enterprise, empowering teams to focus on business growth instead of firefighting. Bolstered by cutting-edge deterministic analytical tools and a suite of new AIOps capabilities, New Relic’s SRE Agent provides next-generation issue triage, change management, incident lifecycle management, intelligent root cause analysis and other features to help engineers cut through data noise and boost operational stability.

“AI is pushing software development beyond human scale, creating a surge of system changes and telemetry volume that IT teams can no longer manage on their own,” said New Relic Chief Product Officer Brian Emerson. “Observability must evolve from simply surfacing data to analyzing it and helping humans take action with less toil. With the new SRE Agent that draws on our powerful AI-strengthened observability capabilities, we’re providing engineers with agentic teammates grounded in live data to resolve incidents faster and with fewer mistakes. The enterprises that win in this era will be those that use AI to cut through noise and optimize business uptime.”

Transforming incident response with proactive AI teammates

IDC predicts that by 2026, over 500 million new applications will be built—the same number of applications built during the previous 40 years. This scale has pushed software complexity beyond human ability to manage it, leaving engineers trapped in manual firefighting for 33% of their time. To break this cycle, organizations must pivot to AIOps—bringing intelligence and flexible automation to traditional ITOps—yet many remain blocked by the limitations of static automation and the need for rigorous agentic governance.

The New Relic SRE Agent: An always-on teammate 

New Relic’s 2026 AI Impact Report found that users of its platform’s AI-strengthened observability capabilities experienced a 25% faster incident resolution time than non-AI capability users. The New Relic SRE Agent doubles down on this impact and helps customers shift operations from reactive to proactive by deploying “always on” AI teammates that diagnose incidents and recommend next steps oftentimes before an engineer acknowledges a page. The agent acts as a specialized worker that performs deep, full-stack diagnostics, combining the flexibility and reasoning capabilities of generative models with “ground truth” brought by a suite of finely-honed deterministic features, such as causal graphs, incident data, performance antipattern knowledge and customer-developed workflows. 

The SRE Agent acts as an intelligent context engine for the incident lifecycle. Through Slack and Zoom integrations, responders can query New Relic directly from triage rooms while the SRE Agent captures human context to power automated fact finding, root cause analysis, impact assessments, and reporting. Users gain a unified view of the evolving timeline of events that led up to and following an incident. As a result, they can measure user impact in real-time, identify duplicate incidents, and generate and refine comprehensive post-incident reports.  

The New Relic SRE Agent draws on new Intelligent Observability Platform capabilities including:

• Intelligent RCA (iRCA): Today’s observability tools drown engineers in alerts but still leave them guessing why an alert fired in the first place. iRCA cuts through the noise by automatically searching the entity's topology graph, scoring the graph using probabilistic causal models, and applying a path-based ranking algorithm to narrow down the problem space in seconds, not hours. By leveraging iRCA, the SRE Agent performs its most time consuming task —separating noise from signal—in high-confidence, deterministic methodologies.
• Workflow Automation: Intelligent automation that enables teams to automate complex or repetitive operational tasks by creating workflows—structured, multi-step processes that can include conditional logic, human approvals, and integrations with external tools, without writing additional code. DevOps and SREs can improve efficiency by automating everything from notification routing and post-deployment health checks to complex processes such as EC2 instance resizing or Lambda function rollbacks. The SRE Agent will be able to invoke workflows but also be invoked as part of a workflow, which adds an almost endless potential for customization and utility to the mix.

Additional AIOps capabilities now available include:

• Performance Risks Inbox: Goes beyond reactive application performance monitoring (APM) to show why an incident or outage is about to happen so action can quickly be taken. Proactively detects and groups critical coding anti-patterns, including slow SQL queries, N+1 queries, excessive database queries, and the like which threaten application stability and business continuity.
• Smart Alerts: An automated alerting engine that uses AI-strengthened anomaly detection and dynamic baselines to reduce alert noise and improve signal quality across complex environments. By delivering more reliable, behavior-aware alerts, it helps teams respond faster and with greater confidence. Use of the capability also lays the groundwork for businesses to maximize agentic AI, ensuring alerts are automated for better deployment of digital workforces. 

“Alerts are no longer enough for SRE teams to prevent costly downtime,” said Archana Venkatraman, Senior Research Director, Cloud Operations and Governance Research, IDC Europe. “Enterprises need AI solutions that can actually help automate remediation, allowing engineers to eliminate manual toil, resolve incidents faster, and scale operations to match today’s dynamic demands. Governance is also key for organizations to trust these AI agents in production environments. Observability is a strategic imperative to meet all these needs.” 

Availability

These innovations are now available in preview to customers as part of the New Relic Intelligent Observability Platform. Workflow Automation is now generally available. 

Learn more

• Read the blog posts on SRE Agent, iRCA, Workflow Automation, Performance Risks inbox and Smart Alerts
• Register for New Relic Advance