New Relic Control is an observability management solution that provides centralized, scalable control over agents and telemetry pipelines across your environment. This documentation covers the solution components, core functionality, and deployment options.
Components
- Agent Control: A lightweight supervisor component that manages other New Relic and New Relic distribution of OpenTelemetry agents. It communicates with Fleet Control to remotely configure, update, and monitor the health of infrastructure-level instrumentation.
- Fleet Control: A centralized interface that provides visibility and remote management of all supervised agents across your infrastructure. It enables teams to install, configure, monitor, and upgrade agents at scale.
- Pipeline Control: The data management component of New Relic Control that helps filter and discard low-value data prior to database ingestion.
Scope
Agent Control and Fleet Control manage infrastructure-level instrumentation across three environments: Kubernetes clusters, Linux hosts, and Windows hosts. The instrumentation they cover includes:
- New Relic agents: Includes agents based on the New Relic infrastructure agent and the New Relic distribution of OpenTelemetry (NRDOT) collector.
- On-host integrations: Includes Apache, Flex, Memcached, MySQL, NGINX, PostgreSQL, and Redis, with support for more added over time.
- Standards-based instrumentation: Includes Prometheus and Fluent Bit.
Not every agent is available on every environment. For what each one supports, refer to the agent type compatibility documentation.
Pipeline Control is in general availability (GA) and can be used to manage data from APM agents by dropping low-value data. For details on supported agents, refer to Supported agent versions
Key behaviors
- Starts without agents: Agent Control installs as a lightweight supervisor with no managed agents by default. You define which agents to deploy via Fleet Control after installation — nothing is automatically instrumented.
- Remote install and upgrade on Linux: On Linux hosts, you can install, configure, and upgrade agents entirely through Fleet Control remote configuration, without touching individual hosts.
- No automatic agent migration: Agent Control does not automatically migrate existing agent installations. If you already have agents running on a host or cluster, you must uninstall them first, then deploy them through Fleet Control. See Manage existing instrumentation for the migration process.
Required permissions
- Agent Control: Requires the Authentication Domain Manager role to set up Agent Control and connect it to Fleet Control. For more information, refer to User Management Concepts.
- Fleet Control: Creating and editing fleets and configurations requires the Organization product admin role, which users in the default User group already have. Running deployments requires either Organization Manager across the organization, or the Fleet manager role granted on specific fleets. For the full breakdown, refer to Manage Fleet Control access.
- Pipeline Control: Requires the Organization Manager role to set up and manage Pipeline Control gateway and Pipeline Control rules.