New Relic has launched the New Relic Autopilot Kubernetes Agent, now in public preview.
The agent is aimed at operations teams, including Site Reliability Engineers and Platform Engineers, working in Kubernetes environments where fault diagnosis and recovery can be difficult. It is designed to identify root causes in cluster incidents and generate remediation code for engineers to review and execute.
Kubernetes has become a central part of application infrastructure for many businesses in Australia and New Zealand, but managing it often requires specialist knowledge. In practice, that can leave companies dependent on a small number of engineers when problems emerge in complex clusters.
New Relic describes the agent as a specialised extension of its broader Autopilot system, which investigates incidents and supports response workflows. While the wider platform covers full-stack observability queries, this version focuses on containerised systems.
The tool runs more than 90 diagnostic detectors across Kubernetes events, object descriptions, logs and application performance monitoring traces. It is intended to help teams investigate issues including compute resource problems, scheduling failures, network errors and cloud configuration faults, such as Application Load Balancer and ingress settings.
A separate challenge for many engineering teams is the scale of modern Kubernetes estates. New Relic cited Cloud Native Computing Foundation research showing that 66% of organisations running generative AI rely on Kubernetes, adding to the operational complexity of large, growing multi-cluster environments.
Expertise gap
New Relic argues this complexity has created an expertise gap in many businesses. Traditional infrastructure operations centred on fixed machines, but Kubernetes shifts that model towards a distributed, self-healing environment that can still be difficult to troubleshoot when failures cascade across services.
That can lengthen incident response times as teams move between dashboards, logs and tracing tools to piece together the cause of an outage. It can also complicate efforts to use general-purpose large language models for support, because those systems may lack direct access to operational context from live environments.
According to New Relic, its Kubernetes agent uses the Ground Truth context engine, built on OpenTelemetry, to analyse correlated operational data, identify a likely cause and generate suggested fix code. Engineers remain in control through human review within existing workflows.
Brian Emerson, Chief Product Officer at New Relic, described the tool as a response to the operational pressures created by complex container infrastructure.
"When critical Kubernetes infrastructure fails, engineers need clear answers, not just more alerts," Emerson said.
"The New Relic Autopilot Kubernetes Agent embeds specialised, agentic AI directly into the engineer's containerised workflows to eliminate the guesswork from complex cluster incidents while keeping the engineer safely in control. Because it works natively across any telemetry source, it provides a level of full-stack observability that specialised or closed-system tools cannot match."
Workflow focus
The product is aimed at teams that already manage operational incidents through established engineering processes rather than standalone AI interfaces. It is designed to fit standard Site Reliability Engineering and platform engineering workflows, with options for human oversight during investigations.
That emphasis reflects a broader pattern in observability and operations software, where suppliers are introducing AI-based investigation tools while still framing them as decision-support systems rather than autonomous operators. In Kubernetes environments, where configuration changes can have wide effects across services, review and approval remain central to incident handling.
For New Relic, the launch also expands its push to tie AI features more closely to observability data. By focusing on a specific operational domain rather than general troubleshooting, the company is seeking to address a problem many engineering teams face when outages affect systems that only a small number of specialists fully understand.
The agent is available in public preview.