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Ruby agent configuration

You can configure the New Relic Ruby agent with settings in a configuration file, environment variables, or programmatically with server-side configuration. This document summarizes the configuration options available for the Ruby agent.

If the default value for a configuration option is (Dynamic), this means the Ruby agent calculates the default at runtime. The value for the config setting defaults to the value of another setting as appropriate.

Configuration methods and precedence

The primary (default) method to configure the Ruby agent is via the configuration file (newrelic.yml) in the config subdirectory. To set configuration values using environment variables:

  1. Add the prefix NEW_RELIC_ to the setting's name.
  2. Replace any periods . with underscores _.

You can also configure a few values in the UI via server-side configuration.

The Ruby agent follows this order of precedence for configuration:

  1. Environment variables
  2. Server-side configuration
  3. Configuration file (newrelic.yml)
  4. Default configuration settings

In other words, environment variables override all other configuration settings and info, server-side configuration overrides the configuration file and default config settings, and so on.

View and edit config file options

The Ruby agent's newrelic.yml is a standard YAML configuration file. It typically includes a Defaults section at the top, plus sections below for each application environment; for example, Development, Testing, and Production.

The Ruby agent determines which section of the newrelic.yml config file to read from by looking at certain environment variables to derive the application's environment. This can be useful, for example, when you want to use info for the log_level config setting in your production environment, and you want more verbose log_level config settings (such as debug in your development environment.

Here is an example newrelic.yml config file:

common: &default_settings
  license_key: 'YOUR_LICENSE_KEY'
  app_name: 'My Application Name'
production:
  <<: *default_settings
  log_level: info
development:
  <<: *default_settings
  log_level: debug

For non-Rails apps, the Ruby agent looks for the following environment variables, in this order, to determine the application environment:

  1. NEW_RELIC_ENV
  2. RUBY_ENV
  3. RAILS_ENV
  4. APP_ENV
  5. RACK_ENV

If the Ruby agent does not detect values for any of those environment variables, it will default the application environment to development and read from the development section of the newrelic.yml config file.

When running the Ruby agent in a Rails app, the agent first looks for the NEW_RELIC_ENV environment variable to determine the application environment and which section of the newrelic.yml to use. If NEW_RELIC_ENV is not present, the agent uses the Rails environment (RAILS_ENV or RAILS.env, depending on the version of Rails) .

When you edit the config file, be sure to:

  • Indent only with two spaces.
  • Indent only where relevant, in stanzas such as error_collector.

If you do not indent correctly, the agent may throw an Unable to parse configuration file error on startup.

To view the most current list of available Ruby agent configuration options, use the rake newrelic:config:docs command. This document describes the most common options.

Update the config file

This documentation applies to the Ruby agent's latest release. For details on earlier versions, refer to the comments in newrelic.yml itself.

To update newrelic.yml file after a new release, use the template in the base directory of the agent gem. When you update to new gem versions, examine or diff config/newrelic.yml and newrelic.yml in the installation directory to take advantage of new configuration options.

Important

Updating the gem does not automatically update config/newrelic.yml.

General

These settings are available for agent configuration. Some settings depend on your New Relic subscription level.

Transaction Tracer

The transaction traces feature collects detailed information from a selection of transactions, including a summary of the calling sequence, a breakdown of time spent, and a list of SQL queries and their query plans (on mysql and postgresql). Available features depend on your New Relic subscription level.

Error Collector

The agent collects and reports all uncaught exceptions by default. These configuration options allow you to customize the error collection.

Browser Monitoring

The Browser monitorig page load timing feature (sometimes referred to as real user monitoring or RUM) gives you insight into the performance real users are experiencing with your website. This is accomplished by measuring the time it takes for your users' browsers to download and render your web pages by injecting a small amount of JavaScript code into the header and footer of each page.

Analytics Events

New Relic dashboards is a resource to gather and visualize data about your software and what it says about your business. With it you can quickly and easily create real-time dashboards to get immediate answers about end-user experiences, clickstreams, mobile activities, and server transactions.

Attributes

Attributes are key-value pairs containing information that determines the properties of an event or transaction. These key-value pairs can be viewed within transaction traces in APM, traced errors in APM, transaction events in dashboards, and page views in dashboards. You can customize exactly which attributes will be sent to each of these destinations.

Audit Log

Autostart

Cross Application Tracer

Custom Attributes

Custom events

Disabling

Use these settings to toggle instrumentation types during agent startup.

Distributed Tracing

Heroku

Instrumentation

Mongo

Process Host

Rake

Resque

Rules

Sidekiq

Slow SQL

Span Events

Strip Exception Messages

Thread Profiler

Utilization

For more help

Additional documentation resources include:

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