Java agent release notesRSS

New features and improvements

Added the following Jakarta EE 9/9.1 compatible instrumentation:

• Jetty 11
• Tomcat 10
• Enterprise Java Beans 4.0
• Jakarta RS/WS
• Jersey 3+
• Jersey Client 3
• JSP 3
• Servlet 5 & 6
• Jakarata.xml
• JMS 3
• Glassfish 6.0
• Open Liberty 21.0.0.12+

Code level metrics

For traced methods in automatic instrumentation or from @Trace annotations, the agent is now capable of reporting metrics with method-level granularity. When the new functionality is enabled, the agent will associate source-code-related metadata with some metrics. Then, when the corresponding Java class file that defines the methods is loaded up in a New Relic CodeStream-powered IDE, the four golden signals for each method will be presented to the developer directly.

Agent log forwarding now adds the following attributes to log events for the log4j2 and logback1.2 frameworks:

• thread.name
• thread.id
• logger.name
• logger.fqcn
• error.class
• error.stack
• error.message

Fixes

Fixed an issue with distributed tracing headers not being added on external requests made with the HttpUrlConnection client

Support statement

New Relic recommends that you upgrade the agent regularly to ensure that you're getting the latest features and performance benefits. Additionally, older releases will no longer be supported when they reach end-of-life.

Full changelog: https://github.com/newrelic/newrelic-java-agent/compare/v7.9.0...v7.10.0

Update to latest version

To identify which version of the Java agent you're currently using, run java -jar newrelic.jar -v. Your Java agent version will be printed to your console.

Then, to update to the latest Java agent version:

1. Back up the entire Java agent root directory to another location. Rename that directory to NewRelic_Agent#.#.#, where #.#.# is the agent version number.
2. Download the agent.
3. Unzip the new agent download file, then copy newrelic-api.jar and newrelic.jar into the original Java agent root directory.
4. Compare your old newrelic.yml with the newly downloaded newrelic.yml from the zip, and update the file if needed.
5. Restart your Java dispatcher.

If you experience issues after the Java agent update, restore from the backed-up New Relic agent directory.

Update agent config differences

We add new settings to newrelic.yml as we release new versions of the agent. You can use diff or another diffing utility to see what's changed, and add the new config settings to your old file. Make sure not to overwrite any customizations you've made to the file, such as your license key, app name, or changes to default settings.

For example, if you diff the default newrelic.yml files for Java agent versions 7.7.0 and 7.8.0, the results printed to the console will be:

➜ diff newrelic_7.7.0.yml newrelic_7.8.0.yml
98c98
<     #forwarding:
---
>     forwarding:
100,101c100,101
<       # When true, application logs will be forwarded to New Relic. The default is false.
<       #enabled: false
---
>       # When true, application logs will be forwarded to New Relic. The default is true.
>       enabled: true

In this example, these lines were added to the default newrelic.yml in Java agent version 7.8.0. If you are moving to 7.8.0 or higher, you should add these new lines to your original newrelic.yml.

New features and improvements

• Where applicable, existing instrumentation has been tested and verified as compatible with Jakarta EE 8. 900
• Add new instrumentation to support Jetty 10. 936
• Update to jfr-daemon 1.9.0 to address CVE-2020-29582 and improve CPU overhead. 937
• Add support to pass a boolean environment variable NEWRELIC_DEBUG where setting it to true activates the debug configuration. 890
• Improved performance by internally replacing regex replace with iterative char replace (thanks to @zowens for this contribution) 933

Fixes

• Update the httpurlconnection instrumentation to use newer distributed tracing APIs so that spans are correctly marked as external calls in distributed traces and contain the expected http.* attributes. 885
• Illegal Access Exception is no longer thrown from apps using NR agent with scala 2.12 and Java 11. 876

Support statement

• New Relic recommends that you upgrade the agent regularly to ensure that you're getting the latest features and performance benefits. Additionally, older releases will no longer be supported when they reach end-of-life.

Update to latest version

To identify which version of the Java agent you're currently using, run java -jar newrelic.jar -v. Your Java agent version will be printed to your console.

Then, to update to the latest Java agent version:

1. Back up the entire Java agent root directory to another location. Rename that directory to NewRelic_Agent#.#.#, where #.#.# is the agent version number.
2. Download the agent.
3. Unzip the new agent download file, then copy newrelic-api.jar and newrelic.jar into the original Java agent root directory.
4. Compare your old newrelic.yml with the newly downloaded newrelic.yml from the zip, and update the file if needed.
5. Restart your Java dispatcher.

If you experience issues after the Java agent update, restore from the backed-up New Relic agent directory.

Update agent config differences

We add new settings to newrelic.yml as we release new versions of the agent. You can use diff or another diffing utility to see what's changed, and add the new config settings to your old file. Make sure not to overwrite any customizations you've made to the file, such as your license key, app name, or changes to default settings.

For example, if you diff the default newrelic.yml files for Java agent versions 7.7.0 and 7.8.0, the results printed to the console will be:

➜ diff newrelic_7.7.0.yml newrelic_7.8.0.yml
98c98
<     #forwarding:
---
>     forwarding:
100,101c100,101
<       # When true, application logs will be forwarded to New Relic. The default is false.
<       #enabled: false
---
>       # When true, application logs will be forwarded to New Relic. The default is true.
>       enabled: true

In this example, these lines were added to the default newrelic.yml in Java agent version 7.8.0. If you are moving to 7.8.0 or higher, you should add these new lines to your original newrelic.yml.

New features and improvements

• Updated the agent to use caffeine 2.9.3 832
• Refactored the log.level attribute name on LogEvents to instead be level 858
• Kafka instrumentation - supports metrics for kafka-clients versions 3.x. 860 and 865
• Update to jfr-daemon 1.8.0 869
• Lettuce instrumentation - supports lettuce-core 4.3 up to 6.x. Please remove any other (experimental/incubating) lettuce extensions or else Redis database metrics could be doubled. 872

Fixes

• Fixed CQLParser getOperationAndTableName exception handling. Exceptions are now handled within the CQLParser. 857
• Removed akka-http-core bindAndHandle instrumentation to resolve scenarios where duplicated transactions could result 850 (see Scala Akka HTTP core instrumentation for more details)

Support statement:

• New Relic recommends that you upgrade the agent regularly to ensure that you're getting the latest features and performance benefits. Additionally, older releases will no longer be supported when they reach end-of-life.

New features and improvements

• Supports Java 18 813
• APM logs in context. Automatic application log forwarding is now enabled by default. This version of the agent will automatically send enriched application logs to New Relic. To learn more about this feature see Java: Configure logs in context, and additional configuration options are available Java agent configuration: Config file. To learn about how to toggle log ingestion on or off by account see Disable automatic logging 817
• Added instrumentation support for the Postgres, MySQL, Oracle & MSSQL R2DBC connectors 810, 816, 829, and 828

Fixes

• Patches a security issue related to an older version of jszip that is included in the Java agent API Javadoc jar 820

Support statement:

New Relic recommends that you upgrade the agent regularly to ensure that you're getting the latest features and performance benefits. Additionally, older releases will no longer be supported when they reach end-of-life.

New features and improvements

• APM logs in context: a quick way to view logs no matter where you are in the platform
  • Adds support for logging metrics which shows the rate of log message by severity in the Logs chart in the APM Summary view. This is enabled by default in this release.
  • Adds support for forwarding application logs to New Relic. This automatically sends application logs that have been enriched to power automatic logs in context. This is disabled by default in this release. This may be on by default in a future release.
  • Adds support for enriching application logs written to disk or standard out. This can be used with another log forwarder to power logs in context if in-agent log forwarding is not desired. We recommend enabling either log forwarding or local log decorating, but not both features. This is disabled by default in this release.
  • To learn more about APM logs in context and the configuration options, please see the documentation here. 718
• Added instrumentation support for the MariaDB & H2 R2DBC connectors 799 724
• Updated agent support for Jedis 4.0.0+ 698
• Updated agent support for Cassandra dataStax 4+ 690

Fixes

• Guard against intermittent null pointer exceptions 707
• Support CSP nonce parameter for RUM header and footer 591
• Fixed an issue with auto app naming and distributed tracing transactions 566
• Increased maximum TransactionError message size 581
• The httpResponseCode, response.status and response.statusMessage transaction/span attributes are deprecated and will be removed in a future release. These have been replaced by http.statusCode and http.statusText 513:

Support statement:

New Relic recommends that you upgrade the agent regularly to ensure that you're getting the latest features and performance benefits. Additionally, older releases will no longer be supported when they reach end-of-life.

Fixes

• Changed log4j version to 2.12.4 to mitigate the security vulnerability CVE-2021-44832. 766

Mitigation for Java 7

• This release is compatible with Java 7.

Support statement:

• New Relic recommends that you upgrade the agent regularly to ensure that you're getting the latest features and performance benefits. Additionally, older releases will no longer be supported when they reach end-of-life.

  Update to latest version

To identify which version of the Java agent you're currently using, run java -jar newrelic.jar -v. Your Java agent version will be printed to your console.

Then, to update to the latest Java agent version:

1. Back up the entire Java agent root directory to another location. Rename that directory to NewRelic_Agent#.#.#, where #.#.# is the agent version number.
2. Download the agent.
3. Unzip the new agent download file, then copy newrelic-api.jar and newrelic.jar into the original Java agent root directory.
4. Compare your old newrelic.yml with the newly downloaded newrelic.yml from the zip, and update the file if needed.
5. Restart your Java dispatcher.

If you experience issues after the Java agent update, restore from the backed-up New Relic agent directory.

Update agent config differences

We add new settings to newrelic.yml as we release new versions of the agent. You can use diff or another diffing utility to see what's changed, and add the new config settings to your old file. Make sure not to overwrite any customizations you've made to the file, such as your license key, app name, or changes to default settings.

For example, if you diff the default newrelic.yml files for Java agent versions 7.7.0 and 7.8.0, the results printed to the console will be:

➜ diff newrelic_7.7.0.yml newrelic_7.8.0.yml
98c98
<     #forwarding:
---
>     forwarding:
100,101c100,101
<       # When true, application logs will be forwarded to New Relic. The default is false.
<       #enabled: false
---
>       # When true, application logs will be forwarded to New Relic. The default is true.
>       enabled: true

In this example, these lines were added to the default newrelic.yml in Java agent version 7.8.0. If you are moving to 7.8.0 or higher, you should add these new lines to your original newrelic.yml.

New features and improvements

• Update to jfr-daemon 1.7.0 - fixes a memory leak condition by cleaning up copies of JFR recordings. Also updated to use version 0.13.1 of the telemetry-sdk 638
• Update HTTP response code attribute names. This will add http.statusCode and http.statusText to spans and transactions 513
• Provide support for Datastax/Cassandra WrappedStatments. 525
• Add instrumentation for gRPC 1.40.0+ 518
• Add suppressed exceptions to ThrowableError.stackTrace 405
• Add Scala instrumentation and Scala API for Monix Tasks 543
• Add instrumentation for Mongo async/reactivestreams drivers versions 3.4.x to 4.1.x 609
• Scala Cats Effect 3 - modified the API to support passing the transaction by implicit reference, rather than using ThreadLocal variables 578
• Add Instrumentation for Play WS 2.6.0 under Scala 2.13 594
• Agent optimization: change String.replaceAll in favor of Pattern.compile 592

Fixes

• Upgrade log4j-core version to 2.17.1 to address security vulnerability CVE-2021-44832 625
• Enhancements for Spring WebFlux and Reactor Netty instrumentation to address gaps in instrumentation. Also includes support for upgraded Spring Security configurations 538
• Update Async-Http-Client library version to 2.0.35 to address security vulnerability CVE-2017-14063 577
• Handle null pointer exceptions in hostname lookup 587
• Properly expire tokens used in CompletableFuture instrumentation to reduce memory usage and prevent telemetry reporting delays 634
• Add additional exception handling to catch ConnectionPoolTimeoutException errors, which may lead to an unrecoverable agent state 637
• Resolve Solr FilterCache Memory Leak 613
• Reintroduce MongoDB sync instrumentation (erroneously removed in a prior release while async support was added) 635
• Fix Sql obfuscation so that it applies correctly to queries with certain formatting 632
• Agent configuration expected_status_codes is not honored when a transaction exception is encountered 565
• Scala Cats Effect - ensure Http4s transaction tracer is created on request run. This resolves some invalid tracer states that were causing null pointer exceptions 530
• Fix Akka HTTP bindFlow 555
• Address Caffeine cache causing memory leak and OOM condition 593

Support statement:

• New Relic recommends that you upgrade the agent regularly to ensure that you're getting the latest features and performance benefits. Additionally, older releases will no longer be supported when they reach end-of-life.

Fixes

• Changed log4j version to 2.12.3 to mitigate the security vulnerability CVE-2021-45105. 605

Mitigation for Java 7

• This release is compatible with Java 7.

Support statement:

• New Relic recommends that you upgrade the agent regularly to ensure that you're getting the latest features and performance benefits. Additionally, older releases will no longer be supported when they reach end-of-life.

Fixes

• Upgraded log4j to 2.17.0 to mitigate the security vulnerability CVE-2021-45105. 605

Recommended Java versions

• This fix is recommended if you are running on Java 8 - 17.

Support statement:

• New Relic recommends that you upgrade the agent regularly to ensure that you're getting the latest features and performance benefits. Additionally, older releases will no longer be supported when they reach end-of-life.