New Relic took the stage at Microsoft Build 2026 in San Francisco this week with a flurry of announcements that deepen its collaboration with Microsoft, spotlighting AI-driven observability agents, a new integration with GitHub Copilot, and accelerating growth on the Azure Marketplace. The three-day developer conference, held June 2–3, served as the backdrop for the company’s most significant platform expansion since its acquisition by Francisco Partners and TPG in late 2023.

Rather than a single flashy launch, New Relic’s presence at Build 2026 emphasized practical AI adoption in operations and development, a strategy that resonated with the 5,000 in-person attendees and tens of thousands watching online. The keynote demo from New Relic CEO Bill Staples drew applause when an Azure SRE Agent diagnosed a cascading failure in a live Kubernetes cluster, correlated it with a recent code change via GitHub Copilot, and executed a rollback—all within 90 seconds.

“We’re moving from dashboards that tell you what’s broken to agents that fix it before your phone buzzes,” Staples said on stage. “And they do it with the full context of your Azure environment, your code, and your incident history.”

The Azure SRE Agent: Autonomous Incident Response

The headline product demo was the Azure SRE Agent, a purpose-built AI agent that lives inside the New Relic Intelligent Observability Platform and hooks directly into Azure Resource Manager, Azure Monitor, and Azure DevOps. The agent uses a combination of large language models and New Relic’s proprietary anomaly detection to not only surface alerts but autonomously triage and remediate common incidents.

During the demo, the agent detected an abnormal spike in 5xx errors on an Azure Kubernetes Service workload. Without human intervention, it pulled container logs, cross-referenced recent deployment events in Azure DevOps, identified the offending version, and initiated a rollback while simultaneously creating a linked bug report in GitHub Issues. The audience saw the entire chain of reasoning displayed in a Studio UI—a timeline of evidence, decisions, and actions.

Early access customers, including a Fortune 50 insurer and a global e-commerce platform, have been testing the agent since February. New Relic reports a 40% reduction in mean time to resolution for incidents handled by the agent, though human-in-the-loop controls remain for high-severity scenarios. The agent is scheduled for general availability in July, initially supporting Azure-based services with plans to extend to hybrid and multi-cloud environments by year-end.

GitHub Copilot Integration: Code-to-Production Observability

In a move that bridges development and operations more tightly, New Relic announced native integration with GitHub Copilot, bringing production telemetry directly into the developer’s coding environment. The integration, available as a Copilot extension, surfaces live error rates, latency, and throughput data for microservices directly in the IDE.

A developer writing a new API endpoint can now see, in real time, how similar endpoints are performing in production. When a new code change is proposed, the Copilot chat panel can advise on potential performance regressions based on historical data from New Relic. This shift-left approach addresses a common friction point: developers unknowingly introducing code that degrades reliability because they lacked visibility into production behavior.

“Most performance bugs are hatched at the keyboard,” said Amanda Silver, Microsoft’s CVP of Developer Division, who joined Staples on stage. “With New Relic and GitHub Copilot, we’re putting the production truth where it belongs—right next to the code.”

The integration requires a New Relic account and a GitHub Copilot subscription, with a free tier for teams of up to 5 developers. Early adopters report a 25% decrease in performance-related regressions in the first quarter of use.

MCP Context: Making Observability Data AI-Ready

A less flashy but strategically vital announcement was New Relic’s adoption of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard championed by Anthropic and increasingly supported by major AI platforms. MCP allows AI agents and assistants to securely access external data sources—including observability telemetry—through a standardized interface.

With MCP support, any compatible AI tool (such as ChatGPT, Claude, or custom enterprise agents) can now query New Relic for metrics, logs, traces, and events using natural language. New Relic demonstrated an IT support chatbot that, upon receiving a user complaint about slow login times, automatically pulled the relevant transaction traces, identified a bottleneck in an authentication microservice, and suggested a fix based on recent configuration changes.

“MCP is the USB-C of AI data,” Staples remarked. “It makes our 15 petabytes of daily telemetry instantly consumable by any AI assistant, without custom integrations.”

New Relic’s implementation goes beyond simple query execution. The platform now exposes curated context packs—pre-defined bundles of dashboards, alerts, and entity relationships optimized for specific AI scenarios. For example, a “Kubernetes Cost Optimization” context pack gives an AI agent all it needs to suggest resource right-sizing recommendations. Available in June, MCP context is included at no additional cost for New Relic full-platform users.

Azure Marketplace Momentum: Double-Digit Growth

On the business side, New Relic shared that its Azure Marketplace revenue grew 68% year-over-year in the last fiscal quarter, fueled by a 52% increase in transactable customers. This continues a trend that saw the company surpass 10,000 Marketplace customers last year. Staples attributed the growth to simplified procurement, Microsoft co-sell incentives, and the rising popularity of consumption-based pricing models.

New Relic also announced a new Azure Marketplace offer: the Intelligent Observability Starter Pack, aimed at small to medium-sized Azure shops. Priced at $499 per month and capped at 50 GB of ingested data, it includes the Azure SRE Agent, basic GitHub Copilot integration, and 30 days of historical data retention. The offer is designed to convert the long tail of Azure customers who have not yet adopted a full observability platform.

“We’re seeing a flywheel effect,” said Staples. “As more Azure customers adopt New Relic, Microsoft’s AI services benefit from better reliability, which in turn drives more Azure consumption. It’s a virtuous cycle.”

Community and Analyst Reactions

Reactions from the developer community on forums and social media were largely positive, focusing on the Azure SRE Agent’s potential to reduce on-call burnout. One Reddit user in the r/devops community wrote, “If this thing really works as advertised, it’s a game changer for SRE teams running on Azure. My only concern is trust—how do you hand over the keys to an AI for production rollbacks?”

Another common thread: the Copilot integration’s privacy model. New Relic clarified that the extension does not send source code to their servers; only aggregated, anonymized telemetry metadata flows between the IDE and the platform. A transparency report and data flow diagram are published in the documentation.

Analysts offered mixed but cautious praise. “New Relic’s agentic approach is a logical evolution, but the market is getting crowded,” said Gartner analyst Padraig Byrne. “Datadog, Dynatrace, and even Azure-native tools are all moving in similar directions. The differentiator here is the depth of the GitHub and Azure integration, which could lock in Microsoft-centric enterprises.”

Forrester analyst Carlos Casanova highlighted the MCP adoption: “This is a smart move that positions New Relic as a data provider for the coming wave of enterprise AI agents. The companies that structure their data for external AI consumption will be the ones that get pulled into every new automation.”

What’s Next?

New Relic’s roadmap extends well beyond Build 2026. Upcoming features include a Service Level Object (SLO)-driven auto-scaling capability that uses the Azure SRE Agent to trigger Azure Scale Sets based on error budget consumption, and a deeper integration with Azure Cosmos DB for end-to-end database observability. A private beta of the Copilot integration with GitHub Actions is slated for Q4, allowing CI/CD pipelines to query New Relic for deployment health checks without leaving GitHub.

On the AI front, New Relic is investing in multi-agent orchestration, where the SRE Agent can collaborate with specialized agents for security, cost, and compliance—all within a governed framework. The company is also contributing its MCP context pack definitions to the open-source community, hoping to spur a standard for observability-aware AI.

For Microsoft Build attendees, the immediate takeaways were clear: New Relic is no longer just a monitoring tool. It’s evolving into an intelligent automation layer that connects Azure infrastructure, developer workflows, and AI-driven operations. Whether enterprises are ready to cede control to autonomous agents remains an open question, but New Relic is betting that the productivity gains will be too compelling to ignore.