New Relic, Inc. (NYSE: NEWR), the industry’s largest and most comprehensive cloud-based observability platform built to help customers create more perfect software, today announced that it is making the company’s agents, integrations, and SDKs available under an open source license. In addition, New Relic is standardizing its future observability offerings on OpenTelemetry, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project, an emerging standard for software instrumentation. New Relic’s support for open source instrumentation and standards will make it easier for software engineers to instrument everything and better understand their digital systems. New Relic’s comprehensive array of agents, integrations, and SDKs are the product of hundreds of thousands of engineering hours and already benefit hundreds of thousands of engineers who count on New Relic every day. With this announcement, the entire development community can benefit from transparency around this ongoing innovation.

“New Relic is committed to open standards, open source instrumentation, and the open communities that support them,” said Bill Staples, chief product officer, New Relic. “The future of instrumentation is open. That’s why we’re taking our significant investments in instrumentation agents and integrations, offering them to the open source community, and committing our engineers to support OpenTelemetry. We want to make it easier for software engineers to instrument everything across their environment, gather complete telemetry, and understand the performance of their digital systems.”

New Relic’s commitment to open instrumentation 

• New Relic is opening its agents, integrations, SDKs, CLIs, and the custom visualizations in the New Relic One catalog under an open source license. This will make it easier for engineers to access the company’s turnkey instrumentation, and it will give advanced New Relic users a foundation to build their own custom instrumentation.
• New Relic is standardizing its future products with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) OpenTelemetry standard. The company is investing code, expertise, and financial resources in support of open standards.

Today’s announcement continues New Relic’s partnership with the open source community. The company is currently a CNCF Silver member as well as being one of the top 5 contributors to their OpenTelemetry project. New Relic also contributes to the W3C Distributed Tracing Working Group, helping to define standards for interoperability between tracing tools.

Comments on the news:

"Bestow is focused on delivering amazing experiences for our customers and New Relic is an important partner to provide us observability,” said Chris Bartels, Engineering Manager, Bestow. “To be able to jump in and contribute to their open source projects and get help from their team will be hugely helpful for my team and show that we have a great partnership with New Relic." 

“The software industry has shifted to a model where low-level software is created using open source licensing and collaboration with a diverse community of contributors, which is then used as the foundation for innovative and differentiating solutions. New Relic’s decision to embrace OpenTelemetry, and in parallel open sourcing its own agent and development tooling, is an affirmation of this trend and constitutes a proactive shift on the part of the company to stay in sync with evolving customer expectations,” said Al Gillen, GVP, Software Development and Open Source, IDC. “Research conducted by IDC finds that 18% of U.S. end-user organizations already share some of their software as open source, while 53% hope to do so in the future.”

Additional Information

• To learn about the company’s commitment to open standards, open source instrumentation, and the open communities that support them, click here. 
• To read our blog, click here. 
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Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains “forward-looking” statements, as that term is defined under the federal securities laws, including but not limited to statements regarding the timing and benefits of New Relic’s open source implementation strategy and support for open standards, the ability for New Relic to execute on its commitment to open instrumentation, the value proposition of these anticipated features to customers, and potential future offerings with OpenTelemetry standards. The achievement or success of the matters covered by such forward-looking statements are based on New Relic’s current assumptions, expectations, and beliefs and are subject to substantial risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and changes in circumstances that may cause New Relic’s actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from those expressed or implied in any forward-looking statement. Further information on factors that could affect New Relic’s financial and other results and the forward-looking statements in this press release is included in the filings New Relic makes with the SEC from time to time, including in New Relic’s most recent Form 10-K, particularly under the captions “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations.” Copies of these documents may be obtained by visiting New Relic’s Investor Relations website at http://ir.newrelic.com or the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. New Relic assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.