What New Relic Built This Year and Why It Changes SRE Workflows

Observability is no longer just about dashboards. It is about systems that can act. I caught up with Brian Emerson, Chief Product Officer at New Relic, at Advance 2026, and one thing was clear. Brian shared a bold view of where software is headed. More applications will be built in the next five years than in the last fifty. That creates a scale problem no team can solve manually. His answer is intelligence and automation, led by what New Relic calls the S agent.

What stood out to me is how this shifts incident response. Instead of pulling people into late night war rooms, the idea is a digital war room where agents constantly watch behavior, surface issues, and even help resolve them. For customers, the starting point is simple. Turn it on and let it begin optimizing alerts and recommendations.

We also talked about trust, which is the real conversation right now. Application health is no longer just uptime. It is behavior, outcomes, and user experience. AI systems can fail quietly, with wrong answers or poor decisions. That is why New Relic is pushing toward agentic monitoring, so teams can see not just the infrastructure but the actual experience their users are getting.

One insight Brian shared surprised me. New Relic chose to lean into fast-improving general models instead of building niche ones, because the pace of change makes specialization short lived. That says a lot about how quickly this space is moving.

His message for leaders was simple. The shift is from recommendations to action. The real opportunity now is letting agents handle the last mile of operations and moving closer to self-healing systems.

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