New Relic and Agentic DevOps with Nic Benders

Observability emerged from the need to understand complex software systems and involves tracking metrics, logs, and traces, so engineers can detect and diagnose problems before they affect users. However, modern applications often encompass hundreds of services, containers, and dependencies, generating more observability data than dashboards and alerts alone can effectively surface. New Relic is a leading observability with a history that spans the full arc of modern software operations. Today, they are working to apply AI to move observability beyond passive monitoring toward active intelligence, where systems can surface what matters, reduce alert noise, and ultimately take autonomous action before problems reach engineers or users. Nick Benders is the Chief Technology Strategist at New Relic, where he has worked for sixteen years. In this episode, Nick joins Lee Acheson to discuss the evolution of observability from dashboards and alerts to AI driven intelligence, how LLMs and statistical tools work together to surface meaningful signals from massive datasets, the emerging challenge of observing AI systems themselves, and what the rise of AI means for the future of software engineering as a profession. This episode is hosted by Lee Atchison. Lee Atchison is a software architect, author, and thought leader on cloud computing and application modernization. His best selling book, Architecting for Scale, is an essential resource for technical teams looking to maintain high availability and manage risk in their cloud environments. Lee is the host of his podcast, Modern Digital Business, produced for people looking to build and grow their digital business. Listen at mdb.fm. Follow Lee at softwarearchitectureinsights.com, and see all his content at leeatchison.com. AI and observability. How exactly do they work together? My guest today is Nick Benders. Nick is the chief technology strategist for New Relic, one of the major observability platforms that is now focused on AI. And Nick is also a personal friend of mine. So Nick, welcome to Software Engineering Daily. Thanks, Lee. It's great to be here. Now you and I go back a long time from New Relic days, early in the New Relic days. So matter of fact, we've just spent a little bit of time talking about some of those earlier days. But can you catch listeners up on what you've been doing since those early days in New Relic and what your role as chief technology strategist really involves? Absolutely. So when I think about New Relic's journey and really in some ways the industry's journey, back when we started at New Relic, we were very much solidly in this instrumentation era. Like, the thing that we sat down at our desks and tried to figure out every day was how can we instrument more of the systems that matter to people? Oh, well, we started with Ruby. How do we get Java? How do we get ..net? How do we get Python? How do we get into the browser or onto mobile apps or add a new library? And pretty soon, we were instrumented so many things that …