New Relic named IDC MarketScape AIOps leader again
New Relic has been named a Leader in IDC MarketScape's Worldwide AIOps 2026 Vendor Assessment, its third consecutive Leader placement in IDC MarketScape studies covering observability and AIOps.
The assessment places New Relic among vendors evaluated on their support for AI-led IT operations as companies contend with growing volumes of software, infrastructure, and telemetry data. IDC expects deployed AI agents to exceed 1 billion by 2029 compared with 2025 levels, increasing pressure on operations teams to manage incidents and system changes at greater scale.
The latest ranking follows earlier Leader positions in IDC MarketScape reports on worldwide observability software and Asia Pacific AIOps software platforms. New Relic said the recognition reflects its work to link operational telemetry with business outcomes and embed AI tools into engineering workflows.
Report findings
IDC highlighted several areas of New Relic's product set, including support for what it described as outcome-centric decision operations, Pathpoint business journey modelling, predictive tools for resource exhaustion and service-level objective breaches, and an OpenTelemetry-based approach to data ingestion and pipeline governance.
According to the report, New Relic's Pathpoint model connects technical performance with revenue and transaction costs, giving teams a way to weigh reliability against unit economics. It also pointed to predictive functions designed to warn of resource constraints and potential service failures before they occur.
On AI operations, IDC noted that New Relic uses large language models with retrieval-augmented generation across knowledge graphs and incident histories. This is intended to produce plain-language explanations and decision pathways, while also providing confidence scoring and audit trails.
IDC also pointed to human oversight in automation workflows, noting that "human-in-the-loop controls, approval gates, and example workflows for automated rollbacks demonstrate how teams can combine rapid automation with explicit authorization and post-change verification patterns."
It added: "Agentic integrations pre-populate ServiceNow tickets and GitHub or IDE-based assistants with contextual recommendations grounded in runbooks via retrieval-augmented generation. This approach blends human expertise with machine inference, embedding intelligent workflows directly into existing engineering tools and practices."
Product focus
New Relic recently introduced what it calls an SRE Agent, a tool aimed at issue triage, change management, incident lifecycle management, and root cause analysis. The company said the software is designed to work continuously, diagnose incidents, and suggest next steps, in some cases before an engineer responds to an alert.
The broader AIOps market has shifted from basic event correlation and automation toward tools that help teams decide what action to take and when. That trend reflects the growing complexity of cloud systems, distributed applications, and AI-driven services, which generate large volumes of logs, metrics, events, and traces that operations teams must interpret quickly.
New Relic's emphasis on OpenTelemetry also stands out in a market where customers are increasingly concerned about data portability and dependence on individual vendors. IDC said the company's use of OTLP endpoints, W3C Trace Context propagation, and centralised pipeline controls reduces lock-in risk while supporting multisignal data ingest, filtering, and routing.
Brian Emerson, Chief Product Officer at New Relic, commented on the ranking and the company's direction in AI-led operations. "We believe being named a Leader by the IDC MarketScape is a testament to our team's steadfast innovation in agentic AI and our foundational support for open standards," he said. "In the AI era, organizations must solve problems beyond human scale. By embedding AI-strengthened remediation and intelligent workflows directly into our platform, we empower our customers to transition from reactive firefighting to intelligent orchestration, ensuring that every technical decision drives a true business impact."
The IDC report also set out its view of how IT operations is changing as automated software agents become more common. "In a world where digital chaos outpaces human reaction, AIOps is not about automation. It requires a radical rethinking of operations, empowering teams to create outcome-driven, collaborative decision-making," said Kalvar.