New Relic's instrumentation is now open source

Observability is important. Being able to understand how well your software and its infrastructure is operating and performing and the experience that your software is delivering to your users is important. And to really have that understanding, you have to instrument everything in your stack, infrastructure through front-end and everything in-between. It doesn’t matter if your stack is traditional or cloud native, capturing complete telemetry helps you make better, smarter decisions about how to build and operate your software. The more complex your software the more important this becomes, and the complexity of software is increasing. There are so many options for how to build software now. There are a plethora of platforms, tools, and technologies that make it easier for devs and engineers to build and operate increasingly resilient, efficient, and complex software. Achieving observability in these new, complex software ecosystems is really hard though.

We - New Relic - are open sourcing our instrumentation. Our agents, integrations, and SDKs are available and open to contributions in the New Relic GitHub organization. That is hundreds-of-thousands of hours of engineering work, available for everyone in open source.

We will also be making our future instrumentation downstream from the CNCF's OpenTelemetry standard, in open source. Which means we will be investing and contributing more to the OpenTelemetry project, helping build the standard for service observability.

We are committing to open source and OpenTelemetry because...

• We want to make it easier for you to instrument everything across your environment, gather complete telemetry, and understand the performance of your software.
• We want to make it easier to make your software observable.
• We want to make it easier for you to build and operate better software.
• We want to engage more with the people that use our software so we can build better software that solves our users' most challenging issues.

The future of instrumentation is open, and we can’t wait to play our part.