Java agent release notesRSS

Improvements

• Mule ESB 3.4 - 3.6

  This release adds instrumentation for Mulesoft Mule ESB Server versions 3.4 through 3.6. Requests to an HTTP Transport will show in New Relic as web transactions. Mule ESB Server instances will appear as "dispatchers" on the overview page and the JVM metrics page. All of the usual features of New Relic APM are supported including alerting, error reporting, JMS puts and takes, cross application tracing, transaction traces, key transactions, external services, and database call reporting.

  NOTE: The newer HTTP operation-based Connector is not yet supported.

• Play 2.5

  This release adds instrumentation for the Play 2.5 framework. The previous Java Agent release supports versions of Play up to 2.4.

• Cassandra async 2.1.2+ and 3.x

  This release adds instrumentation for asynchronous queries in versions 2.1.2+ and 3.x of the Datastax Cassandra driver, including slow query support. You’ll see relevant breakdowns in the overview chart, entries on the Databases page, and segments in transaction traces.

• Async Http Client 2.x

  This release adds instrumentation for external service calls made using Async Http Client versions 2.x. If the called external service is also running New Relic, you will see cross application tracing details as well. This instrumentation will also capture external calls made from Play WSAPI (which uses Async Http Client).

• Transaction traces for key transactions

  If you set an Apdex value for a key transaction, the agent will now capture transaction traces based on that key transaction's Apdex value if it's smaller than the application’s Apdex value.

• JDBC performance and overhead improved

  This release offers better performance and lower overhead of JDBC instrumentation, especially in situations with large numbers of connections.

Fixes:

• Fixed multiple issues related to Java Agent logging including:

  • ClassCastExceptions thrown into customer application logs
  • Agent logging being diverted into customer application logs

• Fixed a bug where transactions could timeout during agent harvest, resulting in missing metrics and logging: "Traced activity timed out after 600 seconds. The traced_activity_timeout configuration parameter can be used to adjust this timeout.”

• Resolved Metric grouping issue in Spray/Akka tell instrumentation. The agent now names temporary actors "temp".

• In rare cases a ClassCircularityError could be induced by the agent when running with a custom security manager.

• Fixed issue where a database connection can get labeled as "JDBC" instead of the more specific, supported database type such as "MySQL" or "PostgreSQL". This issue specifically affects customers running with a proxying or delegating JDBC connection.

Improvements

• JDBC instrumentation

  • JDBC ResultSet instrumentation performance has been improved.
  • Instrumentation has been added for:
  • i-Net Merlia 7.0.3 database driver
  • Generic JDBC drivers

• Cassandra

  This release adds instrumentation for the Cassandra Datastax 3.0 Driver including slow query support. You’ll see relevant breakdowns in the overview chart, entries in the Databases tab, and segments in transaction traces.

  Note: Uses of the client's async API are not currently supported.

Fixes:

• Fixed a bug which caused some applications that use Play and Ning AsyncHttpClient to miss transactions.
• Fixed an issue which would cause the thread profiler to not report data while profiling some Scala classes.
• Fixed a rare bug where a RuntimeException is thrown during class transformation which can prevent some instrumentation from being applied.
• Fixes a rare case where Tomcat ClassLoaders could leak memory when using a JDBC driver bundled in your application after reloading a web application.

Improvements

• Cassandra

  This release adds slow query tracking to Cassandra queries made via the Datastax driver. You’ll now see slow CQL queries on the Databases page and within Transaction Traces. You must add the following to your newrelic.yml configuration to enable this feature in High-security mode:

  transaction_tracer:
        slow_query_whitelist: 
         'com.newrelic.instrumentation.cassandra-datastax-2.1.2'

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• MongoDB

  The Java agent now reports synchronous calls made via MongoDB Java driver 2.14. You will see MongoDB represented on the Overview page, on the Databases page, and in Transaction traces. Note: The asynchronous driver is not yet supported.

• Apache Tomcat

  This release adds support for Tomcat 8.5

• Akka

  • This release adds support for Akka forwarding and Akka broadcasting. The agent will now trace messages broadcast or forwarded to actors.
  • When the system sends a message to an Actor, the agent now reports the name of the actor system that sent the message. Previously, the agent reported “deadletters” under these circumstances.

• Async performance

  This release adds performance enhancements for asynchronous frameworks, especially Hystrix. Performance in Hystrix will noticeably improve for most applications, and will be up to 3x faster when tracing low-latency requests (response time <3ms). Performance for low-latency Play applications will be up to 30% faster.

• JDBC

  This release adds support for the following JDBC drivers:

  • MySQL 6.0.2 and higher
  • i-Net Oranxo 3.06
  • i-Net MERLIA 8.04.03 and 8.06

Fixes

• Fixed a bug that could cause Akka Http instrumentation to throw a NullPointerException into customer code.
• Fixed a bug in the Spymemcached instrumentation that would report operations with the name “None” instead of the correct operation name.
• Fixed a bug that could cause highly asynchronous applications to experience a memory leak in the NewRelic TransactionService.

Improvements

• Spymemcached

  The Java agent now provides visibility into your applications’ usage of Memcached when using the Spymemcached client versions 2.11 to 2.12. You will see the calls in the application breakdown, in trace details, on the Databases page, in Transaction maps, and in Service maps.

• JDBC Drivers

  This release adds support for the following JDBC drivers:

  • INet Oracle Driver (Oranxo) 3.14
  • Sybase (jConnect) JDBC 3 driver

Fixes

• Fixed an issue where the agent treated HTTP headers as being case sensitive, causing CAT to miss under certain conditions.
• Fixed an issue where error data could be dropped, causing 413 status code errors to be reported in the agent log.
• Fixed a bug in spray-http and akka-http routing libraries where response times and/or route names could be reported incorrectly when using Futures within the route.
• Fixed various issues related to the proper handling of multibyte character encoding.
• Fixed a bug in Java agent version 3.26.x that could cause the Thread Profiler to time out.
• Fixed a bug where an error could get printed to the agent log when making SQL queries from an asynchronous framework.

Notes

In support of an upcoming feature, the Java agent is now capable of reporting class metadata including class method signatures, method annotations, class annotations, field annotations, field types, and field names.

This reporting is on by default and can be explicitly disabled in the agent by setting the property in your newrelic.yml configuration file:

command_parser:
    blacklist: send_module_metadata

Improvements

• PostgreSQL

  This release adds improved support for PostgreSQL 8.0+ with jdbc3+. All of these versions now include support for explain plans.

Improvements

• Spray Client

  The agent now identifies external calls when Spray Client is used. You will see your Spray Client calls with the hostname and port of the destination. The calls also have support for Cross Application Tracing, and are shown in Service Maps and Transaction Maps.

• The agent now tracks Futures started in Spray routes.

• The agent now identifies transactions when spray-can is used without spray-routing.

• Slick

  The agent now tracks async activity created by Typesafe/Lightbend's functional-relational-mapper, Slick. If the underlying database driver is supported by the agent the database activity will be traced.

• Improvements for JDBC

  The Java agent’s JDBC instrumentation now provides more consistent and complete data for supported JDBC drivers. The Java agent supports the following drivers:

  • MySQL 5.1.4 - 5.1.x
  • PostgreSQL 8.2-504 - 9.4-1206 (jdbc4 and jdbc41 drivers only)
  • Oracle ojdbc14, ojdbc5, ojdbc6, ojdbc7
  • Microsoft SQLServer 2.0 - 4.2
  • jTDS 1.2 - 1.3.x
  • DB2 9.1 - 10.x
  • Derby 10.6.1.0 - 10.x
  • H2 1.0.x - 1.4.x
  • HSQL 1.7.2.2 - 2.x
  • MariaDB 1.1.7 - 1.3.x

  Note Previous versions of the Java Agent had partial “generic” support for other JDBC drivers. The new, improved JDBC instrumentation replaces the “generic” JDBC instrumentation.

Fixes

• Fixed a bug where CXF would name transactions based on auto-generated proxy classes. The agent now normalizes CXF transaction names.
• Fixed a bug in EJB instrumentation that could cause a NullPointerException in application code.
• Fixed a bug where the EJB instrumentation erroneously set transaction names. In this version, the agent records a metric.
• Fixed a bug in the Cross Application Tracing API that caused Application Response time to be attributed to other transaction time, and prevented linking of transaction traces when doing CAT.
• Fixed a bug in request queueing calculations where queueing time could show up as a steadily increasing value instead of the correct time.
• Fixed a bug that prevented HttpURLConnection External metrics from reporting on the IBM J9 JVM.
• With Spray routing, fixed a bug that incorrectly set the transaction name of similar route names or set them to "Unknown Route".
• Fixed a bug where some transaction traces would report external segments for non I/O calls in Apache HttpClient.
• The Java Agent will now read Cross Application Tracing HTTP header names regardless of case.
• Fixed a bug that could cause cross application tracing between the New Relic Java Agent and non-Java New Relic Agents to fail.

Known Issues

• Postgres JDBC

  This release does not contain support for some versions of the PostgreSQL jdbc3 drivers supported in previous releases. We recommend that you use 3.26.1.

Improvements

• Performance improvements

  The Java agent now starts up to 50% faster. Your applications will be available that much sooner.

Fixes

• In some cases JAX-RS annotations on interfaces were not being observed, causing transactions using JAX-RS services to be named on the servlet rather than the web servicepath and method.
• Fixed an issue that prevents Spray and Akka-HTTP instrumentation from applying when using Scala 2.10.
• Fixed an issue that caused Play 2.x requests to produce empty responses when the circuit breaker is tripped.
• Fixed an issue where setting enable_custom_tracing to false could inadvertently disable Netty instrumentation.

Known Issues

• Fixed in 3.29.0

  • Applications that use Play and Ning AsyncHttpClient may miss transactions.
  • The thread profiler may not report data while profiling certain Scala classes.

• Fixed in 3.28.0

  • Fixed a bug that could cause Akka Http instrumentation to throw a NullPointerException into customer code.

• Fixed in 3.27.0

  • Fixed an issue where the agent treated HTTP headers as being case sensitive, causing CAT to miss under certain conditions.
  • Fixed various issues related to the proper handling of multibyte character encoding.

• Fixed in 3.26.x

  • CXF instrumentation can name transactions based on auto-generated proxy classes. Later agents now normalizes CXF transaction names.
  • EJB instrumentation may cause a NullPointerException in application code, and erroneously set transaction names. In later versions, the agent records a metric.
  • The Cross Application Tracing API caused Application Response time to be attributed to other transaction time, and prevented linking of transaction traces when doing CAT.
  • Request queuing calculations could show queuing time as a steadily increasing value instead of the correct time.
  • HttpURLConnection External metrics may not report on the IBM J9 JVM.
  • Transaction traces may report external segments for non I/O calls in Apache HttpClient.
  • The Java agent will now read Cross Application Tracing HTTP header names regardless of case.
  • Fixed a bug that could cause cross application tracing between the New Relic Java agent and non-Java New Relic agents to fail.

Fixes

• Fixed an issue that caused Play 2.x requests to produce empty responses when the circuit breaker is tripped.

Improvements:

• MongoDB

  The Java agent now reports synchronous calls to the Mongo Java Driver 2.12 through 3.1. You will see the Mongo operations in breakdowns in the Applications Overview chart, entries in the Databases tab, and segments in transaction traces. Note: The asynchronous driver is not supported.

• Akka HTTP and Spray

  The Java agent now reports and names transactions received through Akka HTTP 1.0, Akka HTTP 2.0 and Spray. Transactions are named intuitively based on route DSLs. This instrumentation also supports Cross Application Tracing from calling systems. With our previously released support for Akka, your Akka HTTP and Spray applications will now include activity of those transactions all the way through your actor systems.

Fixes:

• In rare cases the Java agent's EJB instrumentation could cause a StackOverflowException to appear in application logs.
• In some cases the Java agent's Netty instrumentation could throw a NullPointerException to application code.
• Improve performance when using Cross Application Tracing and a large number of threads.
• In some cases the transaction would not be reported when using Akka with mutable messages.

Known Issues:

• Play 2.x requests will produce empty responses when the circuit breaker is tripped. We recommend Play 2.x users disable the circuit breaker when using Java agent versions 3.22 or higher.