Intelligent observability is foundational to all of New Relic’s business outcome value drivers. To put it in as simple terms as possible, it’s about the deployment, configuration, and management practices that will allow you to be successful with your observability program goals. It attempts to ensure you have comprehensively acquired telemetry from all elements of your service delivery estate and developed naming and organizational principles that ensure consistency.

Foundational observability framework

Intelligent observability represents Level 0 in the observability maturity model—the essential foundation that enables all other observability value drivers. Before pursuing advanced business outcomes, organizations must establish comprehensive visibility and data organization practices.

Level 0: Intelligent observability fundamentals

Goal: Establish comprehensive, well-organized telemetry collection across your entire technology ecosystem.

This foundational level ensures you have the visibility and data organization needed to support advanced observability use cases. Success at this level directly enables effectiveness in business uptime, engineering excellence, and digital experience optimization.

Scorecard rules:

• Team tag coverage: Ensures entities are properly tagged with owning teams or organizational functions, enabling accountability and efficient incident response.

• Environment tag coverage: Ensures entities are tagged with appropriate environment designations (production, staging, development), enabling environment-specific analysis and safer operations.

• Uninstrumented entities: Identifies service entities with incomplete observability coverage, helping eliminate blind spots in your system landscape.

• Distributed trace coverage: Evaluates distributed tracing implementation to provide end-to-end visibility into service interactions and request flows.

• Synthetic coverage: Assesses proactive monitoring coverage to ensure service availability and performance validation from user perspectives.

Business impact: Comprehensive instrumentation and organization provide the data foundation needed for all advanced observability practices, reducing mean time to detection and resolution while enabling data-driven decision making.

Essential observability practices

These foundational practices work together with intelligent observability scorecard rules to create a comprehensive approach to observability excellence:

Core implementation practices

Service characterization:

• Capture the right data: Implement comprehensive telemetry collection strategies that capture the right web telemetry to resolve poor customer experiences and enable effective analysis.

Data governance:

• Optimize telemetry: Ensure overall value for the telemetry data you collect with New Relic through strategic data management and cost optimization.

Automation and consistency:

• Observability as code: Automate the configuration of your observability tools for consistency, scalability, and sustained value delivery.

Implementation approach

These practices form the operational foundation that supports your scorecard rule implementation. Service characterization ensures you're collecting the right data, data governance ensures you're managing it efficiently, and observability as code ensures you can scale your practices consistently across your organization.

Together with the Level 0 scorecard rules, these practices create a comprehensive foundation that enables successful progression through reactive, proactive, and mastery levels of observability maturity.

Next steps

Getting started with intelligent observability

Immediate actions

1. Assess your current foundation: Review your existing instrumentation coverage, tagging consistency, and data organization practices against the Level 0 scorecard rules.

2. Prioritize implementation: Start with team and environment tagging to establish basic data organization, then progress to coverage assessments for uninstrumented entities, distributed tracing, and synthetic monitoring.

3. Establish essential practices: Implement service characterization, data governance, and observability as code practices alongside your scorecard rule improvements.

Choosing your observability journey

After establishing intelligent observability fundamentals, select the value driver that best aligns with your business objectives:

Business uptime: Focus on service reliability, incident management, and customer experience protection.

Engineering excellence: Emphasize infrastructure optimization, change management, and security practices.

Digital experience: Prioritize frontend performance, user experience optimization, and customer satisfaction metrics.

Resources and support

• Observability maturity implementation guide: Comprehensive guidance for implementing observability practices across all maturity levels
• Intelligent observability scorecard rules: Detailed specifications for each foundational requirement
• New Relic University: Training resources to develop team expertise in observability practices

Start with intelligent observability to build the foundation needed for observability success, then progress systematically through your chosen value driver to achieve measurable business outcomes.