New Relic Experimental: Open-Source Observability for Modern Stacks
New Relic Experimental is New Relic’s open-source observability incubator, and it is quietly filling one of enterprise monitoring’s biggest gaps. Here, engineers from New Relic and the global developer community collaborate in real time to build telemetry solutions for technologies that formal platforms have not yet caught up to.
The core problem is timing. New tools like AI coding assistants, modern JavaScript frameworks, and novel backend architectures move fast. However, formal enterprise observability integrations take much longer to arrive. In that window, developers are essentially flying blind, relying on workarounds or building custom tools from scratch. New Relic Experimental observability projects exist precisely to close that gap.
Think of it as a collaborative sandbox. Projects here do not carry strict service-level agreements, but they do offer real, immediate utility. Moreover, highly adopted experimental projects can graduate to fully supported New Relic Community or Public Catalog assets. In other words, what starts in the community can become a permanent part of the platform.
Several active projects illustrate the scope. First, the AI Coding Observability project, coming soon, targets teams adopting tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code. Engineering leaders have long struggled to prove whether these tools improve developer velocity or simply inflate costs. Consequently, this project installs lightweight hooks that capture every AI tool call, model interaction, and cost event, giving FinOps teams vendor-neutral telemetry to govern multi-tool AI spend and produce compliance-grade audit logs.
Second, Machine Learning Performance Monitoring tackles a different blind spot. ML models can degrade silently as real-world data drifts from training data. As a result, this project tracks model drift, prediction accuracy, and inference latency in production, helping data science teams protect their investments long after deployment.
Third, the NextJS Integration delivers drop-in observability for the NestJS framework. It automatically surfaces controller, service, and middleware performance, without heavy custom instrumentation code.
New Relic Experimental is open for contribution today. Developers can fork a repository, deploy an experimental hook, or open a pull request at github.com/newrelic-experimental. Ultimately, the community shapes what gets built next.
