New Relic this week extended its core application performance management (APM) platform to include New Relic One, a platform for entity-centric observability. One adds an extra layer of context to performance from data collected within the enterprise’s environments.

New Relic defines an entity as anything that can be instrumented, including microservices, Kubernetes clusters, applications, hosts, services, and Lambda functions. For Nadya Duke Boone, VP of product management at New Relic, this entity-centric approach is what separates New Relic from metric-centric monitoring approaches.

“The market is filled with fragmented tools that look at metrics — monitoring metrics is no longer enough,” she said. Instead, New Relic One will help DevOps teams understand the context for a complex environment, including upstream and downstream dependencies, and help them find, visualize, and understand their data.

“Even as high performing teams adopt DevOps principles for tangible results, DevOps success remains elusive for many organizations. Without the right insights into increasingly complex and dynamic environments, it’s hard to deliver new value faster and at scale,” she said. “For the largest organizations with dozens to hundreds of teams, the organizational complexity creates new boundaries and the need for visibility.”

New Relic One gives DevOps teams a unified view of the entire system, which Boone notes makes sure “everyone is aligned quickly...enabling [a] fast feedback loop.” In addition, it provides visibility into system connections to spot and resolve at the source of performance issues. Boone also said this is a “more programmable platform” for automating, customizing, and integrating within Devops processes.

All existing New Relic customers will be upgraded to receive access to New Relic One.

The release is part of New Relic’s greater push to increase visibility into complex environments — microservices, containers, and other multi-point environments. Last August, the company added monitoring functions for Kubernetes, infrastructure performance data, and distributed tracing for its New Relic Infrastructure platform, which is also attached to its core APM platform.

The Kubernetes Cluster Explorer, that it released at this time, will also be available on New Relic One. This Explorer enables “multi-dimensional problem-solving from infrastructure to applications to services,” said Boone.

According to Boone, New Relic One will host artificial intelligence (AI) for IT operations (AIOps) capabilities, meant to be added later this year. She said that this functionality is driven by its acquisition of SignifAI, an event-intelligence company, which it bought in February.

The APM software company also this week reported its fiscal fourth quarter 2019 and full fiscal year 2019 results. New Relic exceeded guidance with a 34% increase year over year in revenue in the fourth quarter, reaching $132.1 million. For the full fiscal year, the company reached $479.2 million, a 35% increase from the previous year.

New Relic CEO Lew Cirne, according to the Seeking Alpha transcript of the call, attributed this growth to its “sustainable competitive advantage,” which is rooted in being application-centric, highly curated, and scalable.

Cirne also called attention to the fact that the company had a record hiring year in sales and marketing and research and development organizations. And, he added, that it has increased its rate of hiring in its product organization — primarily due to its acquisition of SignifAI and full-stack monitoring company CoScale (which it bought in October 2018).

Going forward, the company forecasts its fiscal 2020 revenue to reach $600 to $607 million. And it plans to focus on the release of three service areas: addressing serverless, logging, and AIOps. New Relic One will “be the delivery vehicle” for these, according to Cirne.

Keith Bachmann, an analyst at BMO, wrote in a research note that "New Relic One is a management layer above current New Relic products that will eventually work with customer and partner products as it evolves. Though early in the introduction, we think New Relic One could help gain incremental share of wallet, lower attrition, and help attract new customers, particularly on the APM side. Hence, New Relic One could help with all product growth rates, though we have greater confidence in terms of affinity with APM solutions."

All of this, Cirne says, is to support its vision of a “more perfect internet,” which New Relic will help achieve by providing the ability to “instrument, measure, and improve the internet to help our customers create more software, experiences, and businesses.”