New Relic Hybrid Agent Brings OpenTelemetry API Support to APM
Quick Reads
- New Relic’s hybrid agent now bridges OpenTelemetry APIs with its native APM pipeline.
- Teams can incrementally adopt OTel without replacing their existing New Relic setup.
- The update supports traces, metrics, and vendor-neutral error capturing.
- No SDK configuration or OTLP exporter setup is required.
New Relic has released hybrid agent support for OpenTelemetry (OTel) APIs, offering engineering teams a practical path to adopting open-standard instrumentation without discarding their current Application Performance Monitoring (APM) setup. The update, announced June 30, 2026, directly addresses one of the biggest friction points in modern observability migration.
As micro-service architectures grow more complex, standardising telemetry collection has become a core infrastructure priority. OpenTelemetry has emerged as the industry standard for this, promising portable, vendor-neutral instrumentation. However, the transition has historically posed a serious dilemma for engineering teams. Many organisations have already invested heavily in mature APM agents, and doing a full “big-bang” migration to a pure OTel SDK across dozens of services is costly and risky.
The new New Relic hybrid agent OpenTelemetry support resolves that conflict directly. Instead of deploying a separate OTel SDK alongside the application, the New Relic agent now acts as the OTel SDK at runtime. It intercepts calls made to the standard @opentelemetry/api package and routes that data into the New Relic APM agent’s native pipeline. From there, telemetry transmits to the New Relic platform using existing secure connections.
This means teams can write fully standard OTel instrumentation code with no references to New Relic in their business logic, while still benefiting from the full APM experience. Custom spans, attributes, and errors captured through OTel APIs appear correctly in unified transaction traces on the New Relic dashboard. Crucially, existing dashboards, alerts, and APM capabilities remain active and unchanged.
One of the most practical advantages is context interoperability. Engineering teams often encounter mixed instrumentation during migrations, with some services updated and others still using legacy APM calls. The hybrid agent handles this cleanly. New Relic native segments nested inside OTel spans appear correctly parented in a single, unified distributed tracing view, so there is no need to rewrite entire services at once.
For African tech teams managing distributed systems across Lagos, Nairobi, or Cape Town, this kind of incremental modernisation path is especially valuable. Engineering resources are finite, and the hybrid approach allows observability upgrades to happen service by service, without service disruptions or expensive rewrites.
New Relic also outlines clear best practices for teams adopting the hybrid model. All new custom instrumentation should default to @opentelemetry/api. Teams should follow OTel semantic conventions for consistent, searchable telemetry data. Vendor-specific code should stay isolated to the application initialisation entry point, keeping core business logic entirely vendor-free.
The supported languages for the hybrid agent are available in the New Relic documentation. Teams looking to explore the platform can also get started for free or request a demo.
The result is a future-proof observability strategy. Code instrumented with OTel APIs today will remain portable regardless of what backend platform a team moves to later. For organisations navigating vendor lock-in concerns, that portability carries real long-term value.
