Rack middlewares

The Ruby agent automatically instruments Rack middlewares. If you are unfamiliar with the basics of Rack middlewares, review the resources linked by the Rails on Rack guide. Additionally, the Ruby agent provides some features via Rack middlewares:

• Distributed traces
• Auto-instrumentation for browser monitoring

New Relic automatically installs these middlewares for Rails and Sinatra.

Rack instrumentation

The two most common ways to configure Rack middlewares are the Rack::Builder API (most often from config.ru) and Rails' middleware stack configuration:

Viewing middleware data

You can view middleware data in APM.

Disabling Rack instrumentation

If you do not want to instrument Rack middlewares, you may disable Rack middleware instrumentation with the disable_middleware_instrumentation setting. You can also ignore specific transactions.

Installing Ruby agent middlewares manually

The Ruby agent's implementation of New Relic's cross application tracing feature uses Rack middleware instrumentation to read and write HTTP headers that are necessary to pass information between monitored applications. If you are using Sinatra, have disabled middleware instrumentation as described above, and want to use cross application tracing, you must manually add the NewRelic::Rack::AgentHooks middleware to your middleware stack.

Manual Rack instrumentation

Earlier versions of the Ruby agent supported manually instrumenting Rack middlewares via the NewRelic::Agent::Instrumentation::Rack module. This instrumentation is deprecated in Ruby agent versions 3.9.0 or higher, because it is unnecessary with automatic middleware instrumentation. New Relic recommends that you remove references to this module from your code after upgrading to 3.9.0 or higher.