This week’s featured open-source project is based on New Relic’s observability platform. In an effort to help software engineers instrument everything and better understand their digital systems, the company is making its agents, integrations and SDKs available under an open-source license. 

“New Relic is committed to open standards, open source instrumentation, and the open communities that support them,” said Bill Staples, chief product officer at New Relic. “The future of instrumentation is open. That’s why we’re taking our significant investments in instrumentation agents and integrations, offering them to the open source community, and committing our engineers to support OpenTelemetry. We want to make it easier for software engineers to instrument everything across their environment, gather complete telemetry, and understand the performance of their digital systems.”

In addition, New Relic is opening CLIs and custom visualizations in the New Relic One catalog. The company will also invest code, expertise and financial resources in support of CNCF’s open standards and OpenTelemetry project.

“The software industry has shifted to a model where low-level software is created using open source licensing and collaboration with a diverse community of contributors, which is then used as the foundation for innovative and differentiating solutions. New Relic’s decision to embrace OpenTelemetry, and in parallel open sourcing its own agent and development tooling, is an affirmation of this trend and constitutes a proactive shift on the part of the company to stay in sync with evolving customer expectations,” said Al Gillen, general vice president of software development and open source at IDC. “Research conducted by IDC finds that 18% of U.S. end-user organizations already share some of their software as open source, while 53% hope to do so in the future.”