New Relic To Launch First AI Observability Assistant: Meet Grok

‘Observability is key to running any kind of reliable software and making sure that we’re providing a great experience to your customers,’ says Jemiah Sius, head of developer relations at New Relic. ‘It’s being able to shuffle through all that data and you can come in and just use natural language in a way that you would chat with any other service out there.’

Observability software vendor New Relic later this month is launching Grok, what it calls the first-of-its-kind generative AI assistant for observability that uses natural language and AI to monitor, debug, secure and improve software stacks.

“Generative AI is making a massive wave across pretty much every industry, the world in general at this point,” Jemiah Sius, head of developer relations at San Francisco-based New Relic, told CRN. “What’s happening with AI right now is you will see a ton of new applications and systems that are going to be developed out of it. It’s lowering the barrier to entry, giving people more access and allowing them to be creative in the way that they actually generate concepts and tools now.”

That in turn creates a need for people to understand the performance of all of those applications and systems that they’re going to be developing, he added.

[Related: 10 Hot Generative AI Products And Companies At RSAC 2023]

Sius said the name Grok is an industry term for when software engineers are “grokking” something, meaning they understand it.

Grok will be launched in a few weeks, but MSPs can request to access a preview now.

With Grok, engineers can set up instrumentation and monitoring, isolate root causes, debug code-level issues, generate reports and dashboards, and manage admin tasks all using the power of AI.

“We want to be in the space where our competitors aren’t,” Sius said. “That’s where Grok came from. It’s understanding the world where things are going and then knowing that people are going to need a tool that will help them understand their platforms and their services.”

For MSPs, Grok offers easier on-boarding as it puts the power of observability at the fingertips of engineers.

“Our clients understand the value of observability, but often their teams lack time to manually sift through large volumes of data,” Andrea Gallo, manager of U.S. operations at technology consultancy Moviri, told CRN via email. “Generative AI, like New Relic Grok, has the potential to help customers use plain language to identify the root cause of issues, debug code-level errors, and explain insights uncovered from telemetry data.”

Engineers are typically faced with an abundance of siloed telemetry data, lack of familiarity with ever-changing complex systems and challenging troubleshooting interfaces. New Relic Grok aims to address those hurdles.

“Observability is key to running any kind of reliable software and making sure that we’re providing a great experience to your customers,” Sius said. “It’s being able to shuffle through all that data and you can come in and just use natural language in a way that you would chat with any other service out there. It’s going to allow you to understand what’s going on within your systems.”

Grok also is going to help MSPs on-board their customers more easily and allow them to reach into larger parts of an organization, according to Sius.

“It can guide you into different parts of the platform with context,” he said. “Instead of me having to go in and figure out if I wanted to do something … I don’t have to really think about that anymore. I can just go in and ask a question and it’s going to guide me to that right spot. Now I want to do the same for [Microsoft] Azure and then it’s going to flip me over there. So it’s just going to really streamline that process of using the tool, and all of those things really add to revenue potentials for an MSP.”