New Relic, the all-in-one observability platform for every engineer, has announced its native support for OpenTelemetry and Prometheus-instrumented hosts and Kubernetes clusters at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2024. This move deepens the company’s commitment to open source and aims to simplify observability for engineers.

With the launch of this support, organizations can now instrument Kubernetes clusters and hosts using the OpenTelemetry collector and Prometheus Node Exporter in a single step. This provides instant access to curated UIs that automatically correlate performance across applications and infrastructure.

The adoption of open source instrumentation frameworks like OpenTelemetry and Prometheus is on the rise due to their standardized, vendor-agnostic, community-supported, and cost-effective nature. However, integrating these tools with commercial observability platforms typically requires significant time and expertise. Engineers often face challenges in gathering the right telemetry for each resource, establishing correlation tagging, creating dashboards, and setting performance thresholds.

New Relic’s solution aims to address these challenges by simplifying the process of instrumenting and gaining visibility into applications and infrastructure telemetry data. This, in turn, is expected to lower incident response times and allow engineers to focus more on shipping code and driving innovation.

Manav Khurana, Chief Product Officer at New Relic, emphasized the importance of meeting developers where they are in the industry. He stated, ‘Open source frameworks like OpenTelemetry are an integral part of the tech stack, and that reliance continues to grow. Most observability platforms only offer primitive support for these tools. There needs to be a shift in the industry to meet developers where they are. That is why we offer native support for OpenTelemetry in our platform. We are now simplifying observability for engineers using OpenTelemetry and Prometheus so they can spend less time on instrumentation, setup, and troubleshooting and more time on what matters most to them – shipping code and driving innovation.’

Carly Christensen, CTO of ZeroFlucs, expressed their preference for New Relic over other observability platforms due to its deep and native integration with OpenTelemetry. Christensen highlighted New Relic’s continuous efforts to stay ahead of other vendors by adding new features like native support for OpenTelemetry and Prometheus-instrumented hosts.