Your logs are flooding the screen. Alerts are pinging everywhere. You have metrics, traces, and dashboards stacked like nesting dolls. You know you need visibility, but which tool gives the right view? That’s where understanding New Relic SolarWinds comes in.
New Relic and SolarWinds both live in the world of observability, but their strengths differ. New Relic focuses on application performance monitoring with deep instrumentation across distributed systems. SolarWinds, on the other hand, was built for network and infrastructure visibility, from routers to databases. When used together, they form a panoramic lens across your stack—code to copper.
In practice, many teams run one as the main APM and the other as a network watchdog. Data from SolarWinds flows upward, complementing application-level telemetry from New Relic. The integration becomes an operational bridge, aligning SREs, developers, and IT admins under the same metrics truth.
Imagine it like this: New Relic tells you a transaction slows down. SolarWinds shows that the switch on the fifth rack dropped packets at the same moment. Line the timelines up, and root cause analysis becomes a five‑minute exercise, not an all‑day mission.
How the integration works
Typically, the connection uses APIs or event gateways to push metrics and alert data between the two systems. You define identifiers for services, hosts, or network devices, map them to environment tags, and stream the telemetry to a common alerting layer. Log forwarding or webhooks ensure that incidents in one platform raise context in the other without duplicate tickets.
Best practices
- Keep consistent resource naming across both tools for clean correlation.
- Use role-based access control (RBAC) from your identity provider, like Okta or Azure AD, so visibility does not equal privilege.
- Rotate API keys and secrets with automated workflows and enforce least privilege in AWS IAM policies.
Benefits of using New Relic SolarWinds together
- Faster root cause discovery and reduced mean time to recovery.
- Unified health metrics that cut across apps, networks, and infrastructure.
- Stronger audit trails for SOC 2 and compliance reviews.
- Less toil for ops teams managing alert storms.
- Sharper communication between software and network engineers.
Include one platform to own the pipeline logic and another to tell the reliability story. Platforms like hoop.dev take the same approach for secure operations. They turn identity and access boundaries into guardrails, automatically enforcing how engineers connect and monitor sensitive systems.
Quick answer: How do I connect New Relic and SolarWinds?
You can link them through API keys or webhook endpoints that exchange alert and metric data. Set up endpoints on both ends, map identifiers, and test with a controlled alert to ensure flow works both ways. Once verified, you can automate the sync for every environment.
As AI copilots spread into observability, expect smarter correlation between tools like these. Models can flag anomalies, predict outages, and surface relevant events faster than humans can scroll through dashboards. But they still depend on clean, unified data streams—the very reason integrating New Relic and SolarWinds is worth the effort.
In short, run both when you want end-to-end intelligence: applications in New Relic, infrastructure in SolarWinds, all measured against one operational heartbeat.
See an Environment Agnostic Identity-Aware Proxy in action with hoop.dev. Deploy it, connect your identity provider, and watch it protect your endpoints everywhere—live in minutes.