New Relic is reframing OpenTelemetry (OTel) from a risky migration project into an incremental operating model shift, promising observability leaders a way to standardize on open telemetry without tearing out existing agents or dashboards.
OpenTelemetry Without the Migration Tax
For many enterprises, the promise of OTel has come with a hard tradeoff: accept months of refactoring and lost features to adopt open standards, or stay with proprietary agents and risk being boxed into a single vendor’s roadmap. New Relic’s APM hybrid agents aim to break that binary by embedding OTel API compatibility and instrumentation support directly into existing language agents. In practical terms, that means engineering leaders can begin instrumenting services and libraries with OTel while legacy workloads continue using New Relic’s proprietary instrumentation, with traces and metrics stitched together into a single view.
Day to day, this changes how platform and SRE teams manage observability migrations. Instead of running parallel stacks or scheduling disruptive “rip-and-replace” efforts, teams can roll OTel in gradually, service by service, without breaking existing dashboards, alerts and SLO reporting. Backward compatibility allows existing visualizations and alert policies while OTel features such as dimensional metrics and span links are adopted at the team’s own pace. Observability owners move from firefighting broken traces to managing a controlled, mixed-mode environment.
New Relic also is positioning its approach as an answer to vendor lock-in concerns. By consuming telemetry directly from third-party open source libraries instrumented with OTel APIs, the platform supports a vendor-neutral, implementation-neutral model. For technology executives, that reduces long-term switching risk and makes it easier to negotiate contracts knowing that the underlying telemetry format is not proprietary.
Standardizing on OTel With Less Operational Drag
The company’s OTel-based infrastructure monitoring, built on the New Relic Distribution of OpenTelemetry (Infra NRDOT), helps teams standardize on OTel for host and process telemetry without building their own collectors, exporters and pipelines from scratch. Infra NRDOT provides OTel-native visibility mapped into existing New Relic dashboards and curated experiences, so infra and platform teams see familiar views even as the data path shifts under the hood.
An integrated Adaptive Telemetry Processor filters out low-value signals, helping control ingestion volume and cost. For FinOps and observability leaders, this directly affects daily work: they can set policies to keep only the most critical host and process telemetry, reducing noisy data without giving up coverage. That turns “OTel sprawl” from a cost risk into a managed variable.
Collector Observability further targets a blind spot in many OTel programs. Because OTel Collectors act as middleware for metrics, traces and logs, misconfigurations or saturation can silently drop data or introduce latency. New Relic’s dedicated Collector Observability gives engineers real-time insight into collector health, configuration and performance. Instead of guessing whether data gaps are caused by application issues, storage latency or pipeline bottlenecks, teams can see the collector layer directly and fix problems before they cascade into outages or missing telemetry.
For technology executives, the net result is an observability stack that can evolve toward OTel at the pace of organizational change, not forced migration timelines. Platform teams get a unified data foundation for both proprietary and open telemetry, SREs get better tools to keep pipelines healthy, and finance teams gain more control over observability spend.
What This Means for ERP Insiders
Hybrid observability becomes the new normal. By unifying proprietary agents and OTel in a single, intelligent instrumentation layer, New Relic’s approach shows how ERP and adjacent platforms will increasingly run in mixed observability modes, demanding strategies that manage coexistence rather than one-time migrations.
OTel standardization shifts integration economics. Standardizing on OTel via distributions like Infra NRDOT changes how ERP leaders think about integration, allowing shared telemetry pipelines across core ERP, custom extensions and edge services, while giving FinOps teams tools to keep data volume, and therefore cost, under tighter control.
Collector health becomes a first-class reliability concern. With dedicated Collector Observability turning OTel middleware into a visible, managed asset, SREs and architects will treat telemetry pipeline health as part of core reliability engineering, integrating collector monitoring into incident response, SLO design and platform capacity planning.
