.NET agent release notesRSS

New Features

• Improved support for WCF.

  • Support for Task-based (TAP) service calls.
  • Distributed Tracing and CAT are automatically supported for HTTP-based binding types (such as BasicHTTP, WebHTTP, WSHTTP).
  • Non-HTTP binding types (such as NetTCP, MSMQ, Named Pipes) are instrumented, but do not automatically support Distributed Tracing and CAT.

• [.NET Core] Adds support for .NET Core 3.1 beginning with preview 1.

• Performance Metrics: The .Net Agent collects information about application performance in the following areas.

  • Memory and CPU Utilization
  • Garbage Collection
  • Threadpool Usage and Throughput

  Please refer to online documentation for further information.

Fixes

• [.NET Framework] Fix an issue where reading application settings from web.config or app.config could prevent the agent from starting up.
• [.NET Framework] Fix an issue where the agent caused an application to deadlock when using a ConfigurationBuilder. This was commonly seen in applications using the AzureKeyVaultConfigBuilder.
• Fix an issue introduced in 8.16 where Memory and CPU metrics failed to update.

Upgrading

• Follow standard procedures to update the .NET agent.
• If you are upgrading from a particularly old agent, review the list of major changes and procedures to upgrade legacy .NET agents.

New Features

• .NET agent installation procedures have been simplified for Windows environments enabling you to more easily monitor .NET Core applications. Our standard installation procedures use a single MSI installer to install support for both .NET Framework and .NET Core applications. If you previously only monitored .NET Framework applications then nothing changes for you. If you were previously installing our .NET Core support using one of our manual install procedures you may need to port any custom modifications you have made to your newrelic.config and any XML custom instrumentation you have applied to the new install location.
• Trace Accessors APIs: two new API calls to obtain information used to support tracing.
  • TraceMetadata - returns a property with access to the following:
    • TraceId - the currently executing trace's identifier.
    • SpanId - the currently executing span's identifier.
    • IsSampled - returns whether or not the current transaction is part of a sampled distributed trace.
  • GetLinkingMetadata - returns key/value pairs which can be used to correlate this application in the New Relic backend.

Fixes

• [.NET Framework] Fix an issue in WCF instrumentation where multiple transactions were created for a call to a WCF service endpoint that used the begin/end async pattern.
• [.NET Core] Fix an application crash bug on Alpine Linux.

Upgrading

• Follow standard procedures to update the .NET agent.
• If you are upgrading from a particularly old agent, review the list of major changes and procedures to upgrade legacy .NET agents.

New Features

• Adds instrumentation for StackExchange.Redis asynchronous methods. Generally, these methods end with the Async suffix (e.g., StringSetAsync).
• [.NET Core] Adds support in the .NET Core Agent for StackExchange.Redis.

Fixes

• Resolves security issue where a manually constructed SQL stored procedure invocation may cause sensitive data to be captured in metric names. See Security Bulletin NR19-05
• Fix a memory leak introduced in agent version 8.17.438.0.
• Fixes an issue where NullReferenceExceptions may be logged in scenarios where a large number of segments are created for a single transaction.
• Fix an issue where the request.uri attribute on transaction traces and event data would be set to the full URI of the request instead of the request path (e.g., http://www.domain.com/request/path instead of /request/path) in automatic instrumentation of ASP.NET and WCF applications, as well as in the agent API method SetTransactionUri().
• [.NET Core] Fix an issue where memory and CPU metrics may be overstated in APM.
• [.NET Framework] Fix an issue with the 8.17.438.0 release which can cause a delay in starting up an application.
• [.NET Framework] Fix an issue where the agent may fail to start for 32-bit ASP.NET MVC applications when the NewRelic.Agent NuGet package was used to install the agent.
• [.NET Framework] Fix an issue on agent shutdown where an error log message may appear in the agent log indicating an HTTP 409 error response from New Relic. This error did not have any other impact other than appearing in the log.
• [.NET Framework] Fix an issue where a large number of error messages may be reported on agent startup due to insufficient permissions of the app-pool user to create performance counters. In this release, a specific warning message regarding permissions will be reported.

Upgrading

• Follow standard procedures to update the .NET agent.
• If you are upgrading from a particularly old agent, review the list of major changes and procedures to upgrade legacy .NET agents.

Notes

This is a security-only release for the 6.x agents that support legacy frameworks (.NET version 4.5 and lower). If you are on .NET version 4.5 or higher, or if you are on .NET Core, use the 7.x or later agent versions.

Fixes

Resolves security issue where a manually constructed SQL stored procedure invocation may cause sensitive data to be captured in metric names. See Security Bulletin NR19-05.

Upgrading

• Follow standard procedures to update the .NET agent.
• If you are upgrading from a particularly old agent, review the list of major changes and procedures to upgrade legacy .NET agents.

New Features

• This release adds Transaction event attributes that provide context between your Kubernetes cluster and services. For details on the benefits see this blog post.
• The NewRelic.Agent NuGet package now includes the x86 (32-bit) profiler for Windows. To monitor 32-bit Windows applications using this NuGet package the COR_PROFILER_PATH (.NET Framework) or the CORECLR_PROFILER_PATH (.NET Core) environment variable needs to be set to the path the of the 32-bit profiler DLL (NewRelic.Profiler.x86.dll).
• For .NET Core applications hosted in Azure App Services, the New Relic Azure Site Extension can now be used to install the agent. This was previously only available for .NET Framework applications. Follow these procedures to install.

Fixes

• Fixed an issue where the NRQL Extrapolate clause in Insights did not work properly for Transaction Events.
• Fixed an issue where cross application tracing could cause a metric grouping issue (MGI) for web requests that result in a 300 or higher response status code. Transaction names may now be rolled up by status code.
• Fixed an issue where browser script injection in ASP.NET applications could cause a metric grouping issue (MGI) for web requests that result in a 30x redirect status code. Transaction names may now be rolled up by status code.

Upgrading

• Follow standard procedures to update the .NET agent.
• If you are upgrading from a particularly old agent, review the list of major changes and procedures to upgrade legacy .NET agents.

Fixes

• CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) “pre-flight” requests with the HTTP OPTIONS method were causing extraneous metrics to be generated for ASP.NET Core applications using the CORS middleware. These requests will now be ignored by the agent.
• Fixes a problem where WCF instrumentation shuts down when WebHttpBinding is used and CAT is enabled.
• Fixes a problem where an async WCF client call may prevent further data from being captured in a transaction.

New Features

• Adds database instrumentation for Microsoft.Data.SqlClient.

Upgrading

• Follow standard procedures to update the .NET agent.
• If you are upgrading from a particularly old agent, review the list of major changes and procedures to upgrade legacy .NET agents.

Fixes

• Fixes a problem with parsing method signatures that do not align with ECMA-335 that could cause an application to crash.
• Fixes a problem where third-party libraries that perform assembly-scanning using reflection may encounter TypeLoadExceptions.
• Fixes a problem where the agent may incorrectly report Response Time when custom instrumentation is applied to methods that are called from within an instrumented framework (such as ASP.Net).
• Resolves security issue with how SQL Server handles escaping which could lead to a failure to correctly obfuscate SQL statements. See Security Bulletin NR19-03.
• Resolves issue with not rolling up 30x HTTP response codes which resulted in MGI issues.

New Features

• Adds improved WCF support
  • WCF client task asynchronous programming model (following the task asynchronous pattern) calls are tracked as external calls.

Upgrading

• Follow standard procedures to update the .NET agent.
• If you are upgrading from a particularly old agent, review the list of major changes and procedures to upgrade legacy .NET agents.

Notes

This is a security-only release for the 6.x agents that support legacy frameworks (.NET version 4.5 and lower). If you are on .NET version 4.5 and higher or .NET Core, the 7.x or later versions of the agent should be used.

Fixes

• Resolved security issue with how SQL Server handles escaping which could lead to a failure to correctly obfuscate SQL statements. See Security Bulletin NR19-03.

Upgrading

• Follow standard procedures to update the .NET agent.
• If you are upgrading from a particularly old agent, review the list of major changes and procedures to upgrade legacy .NET agents.

Fixes

• Fixed issue where transactions may not get reported when custom instrumentation is applied to async methods with a void return type. Instrumenting async void methods is generally not recommended and may result in unexpected segment timing as well as the disruption of downstream instrumentation. Please review async limitations online help for alternative approaches.

New Features

• [.NET Core] Adds support for .NET Core 3.0
• [.NET Core] Adds support for ASP.NET Core 3.0
• [.NET Framework] Adds support for .NET Framework 4.8 Early Access build 3694
• Adds official support for Postgres/Npgsql versions 4.0.
  • Supports Sync and Async methods, on .Net Framework and .Net Core running in Windows and Linux.
  • Eliminates duplicate and extraneous datastore metrics and trace segments associated with opening connections to databases (as seen in prior agent versions).
  • Npgsql versions older than 4.0 may also be instrumented, but duplicate and/or missing metrics are possible.
• Adds improved WCF support
  • WCF client calls are tracked as external calls
  • WCF client synchronous and asynchronous programming model (following the begin/end asynchronous pattern) calls are tracked.

Upgrading

• Follow standard procedures to update the .NET agent.
• If you are upgrading from a particularly old agent, review the list of major changes and procedures to upgrade legacy .NET agents.