.NET agent release notesRSS

Fixes

• Fixes #223 so the agent can be compatible with ASP.NET Core 5 RC1.
• Fixes issue in .NET 5 applications where external calls made with HttpClient may not get instrumented. For example, calls made with HttpClient.GetStringAsync would be missed. (#235)
• Fixes issue #257 where .NET Standard Libraries that do not reference mscorlib fail to be instrumented in .NET Framework applications.
• Reduces the performance impact of large amounts of instrumentation. See issue #269 for more information.

Checksums

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

• Proxy Password Obfuscation Support
  Agent configuration supports the obfuscation of the proxy password. The New Relic Command Line Interface (CLI) may be used to obscure the proxy password. The following documentation describes how to use an obscured proxy password in the .NET Agent configuration.
• MySqlConnector Support
  The MySqlConnector ADO.NET driver is instrumented by default. Fixes #85 and implements this suggestion.
• Nullable Reference Type support in the API
  Enables nullable reference types that are part of the C# 8.0 language specification and updates the signatures of API methods accordingly. There should be no required changes in API usage.
• Improved Support for NetTCP Binding in WCF Instrumentation
  When the NetTCP Binding type is used in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), the Agent will now send and receive trace context information in support of Distributed Tracing (DT) or Cross Application Tracing (CAT). Implements #209.

Fixes

• Fixes an issue that may cause InvalidCastException due to an assembly version mismatch in Mvc3 instrumentation.
• Fixes an async timing issue that can cause the end time of Task-returning methods to be determined incorrectly.

Checksums

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

The 6.x agent supports 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 8.x agent versions.

Download URLs

Download the appropriate release for your New Relic .NET agent:

• .NET Framework

New Features

• The .NET Agent is now open source!
  The New Relic .NET agent is now open source! Now you can view the source code to help with troubleshooting, observe the project roadmap, and file issues directly in this repository. We are now using the Apache 2 license. See our Contributing guide and Code of Conduct for details on contributing!
• SSL Required
  In order to increase security, disabling agent HTTPS communication via the service SSL configuration is no longer supported. All communication with New Relic services will occur via SSL.
• EU Data Center Support
  Adds support for communicating with New Relic's EU Data Center. Please review our docs site for further information.

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

• Expected Errors Support
  Certain errors that are expected within the application may be identified so that they will not be counted towards the application's error rate and Apdex Score. Only errors that truly affect the health of the application will be alerted on. Please review the following documentation for details on how to configure Expected Errors.

• Ignored Errors Enhancements
  Certain errors may be identified in configuration so that they will be ignored. These errors will not be counted towards the application's error rate, Apdex score, and will not be reported by the agent. Please review the following documentation for details on how to configure Ignored Errors.

  • New configuration element <ignoreMessages>supports filtering based on the error message.
  • Please note that the <ignoreErrors> configuration element has been deprecated and replaced by <ignoreClasses>. The .NET Agent continues to support this configuration element, but its support may be removed in the future.

Fixes

• Garbage Collection Performance Metrics for Windows
  Fixes an issue where Garbage Collection Performance Metrics may not be reported for Windows Applications.
• Maintaining newrelic.config on Linux package upgrades
  Fixes an issue where newrelic.config was being overwritten when upgrading the agent via either rpm/yum (RedHat/Centos) or dpkg/apt (Debian/Ubuntu).

Checksums

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

• The .NET agent is now open source!
  The New Relic .NET agent is now open source! Now you can view the source code to help with troubleshooting, observe the project roadmap, and file issues directly in this repository. We are now using the Apache 2 license. See our Contributing guide and Code of Conduct for details on contributing!

Fixes

• Memory usage reporting for Linux
  Fixes issue where applications running on Linux were either reporting no physical memory usage or using VmData to report the physical memory usage of the application. The agent now uses VmRSS through a call to Process.WorkingSet64 to report physical memory usage. See the dotnet runtime discussion and the proc man pages for more details about this change.
• Infinite Tracing performance
  Fixes issue where the agent may consume too much memory when using Infinite Tracing.
• .NET 5 support
  Fixes issue with applications running on .NET 5 that prevented instrumentation changes at runtime (either though editing instrumentation XML files or through the Live Instrumentation editor Beta).

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

• Additional Transaction Information applied to Span Events When Distributed Tracing and/or Infinite Tracing are enabled, the Agent will now incorporate additional information from the Transaction Event on to the root Span Event of the transaction. The following items are affected:

  1. Request Parameters request.parameter.*
  2. Custom Attribute Values applied to the Transaction via API Calls AddCustomParameter and ITransaction.AddCustomAttribute.
  3. request.uri
  4. response.status
  5. host.displayName

• Security Recommendation Review your Transaction Attributes configuration. Any attribute include or exclude settings specific to Transaction Events, should be applied to your Span Attributes configuration or your Global Attributes configuration.

Fixes

• Fixes issue where updating custom instrumentation while application is running could cause application to crash.

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

Fixes

• Infinite Tracing
  • Fixes issue with Infinite Tracing where a communication error can result in consuming too much CPU.
  • Fixes issue with Infinite Tracing where a communication error did not clean up its corresponding communication threads.
  • Agent version 8.30 introduces significant performance enhancements to Infinite Tracing. To use Infinite Tracing, please upgrade to version 8.30 or later.
• Fixes issue in .NET Framework ASP.NET MVC applications where transactions started on one thread would flow to background threads (e.g., started with Task.Run) in some scenarios but not others. Transaction state used to only flow to a background thread if the transaction originated from an async controller action. Transaction state now flows to background threads regardless of whether the controller action is async or not.
• Fixes issue in .NET Framework ASP.NET MVC applications where agent instrumentation of an MVC controller action could cause an InvalidProgramException.
• Fixes a problem with the reporting of Errors where Error Events may not appear even though Error Traces are being sent.

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

• Support for W3C Trace Context, with easy upgrade from New Relic trace context
  • Distributed Tracing now supports W3C Trace Context headers for HTTP when distributed tracing is enabled. Our implementation can accept and emit both W3C trace header format and New Relic trace header format. This simplifies agent upgrades, allowing trace context to be propagated between services with older and newer releases of New Relic agents. W3C trace header format will always be accepted and emitted. New Relic trace header format will be accepted, and you can optionally disable emission of the New Relic trace header format.
  • When distributed tracing is enabled with <distributedTracing enabled="true" />, the .NET agent will now accept W3C's traceparent and tracestate headers when calling Transaction.AcceptDistributedTraceHeaders. When calling Transaction.InsertDistributedTraceHeaders, the .NET agent will include the W3C headers along with the New Relic distributed tracing header, unless the New Relic trace header format is disabled using <distributedTracing enabled="true" excludeNewrelicHeader="true" />.
  • The existing Transaction.AcceptDistributedTracePayload and Transaction.CreateDistributedTracePayload APIs are deprecated in favor of Transaction.AcceptDistributedTraceHeaders and Transaction.InsertDistributedTraceHeaders.

Fixes

• Fixes issue which prevented synthetic monitors from working when distributed tracing is enabled.
• Fixes issue where our RPM package for installing the agent on RPM-based Linux distributions included a 32-bit shared library, which created unnecessary dependencies on 32-bit system libraries.
• Fixes issue where the TransportDuration metric for distributed traces was always reporting 0.

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

• Infinite Tracing on New Relic Edge

  This release adds support for Infinite Tracing on New Relic Edge. Infinite Tracing observes 100% of your distributed traces and provides visualizations for the most actionable data so you have the examples of errors and long-running traces so you can better diagnose and troubleshoot your systems.

  You configure your agent to send traces to a trace observer in New Relic Edge. You view your distributed traces through the New Relic’s UI. There is no need to install a collector on your network.

  Infinite Tracing is currently available on a sign-up basis. If you would like to participate, please contact your sales representative.

  Agent version 8.30 introduces significant performance enhancements to Infinite Tracing. To use Infinite Tracing, please upgrade to version 8.30 or later.

• Error attributes now added to each span that exits with an error or exception

  Error attributes error.class and error.message are now included on the span event in which an error or exception was noticed, and, in the case of unhandled exceptions, on any ancestor spans that also exit with an error. The public API method NoticeError now attaches these error attributes to the currently executing span.

  Spans with error details are now highlighted red in the Distributed Tracing UI, and error details will expose the associated error.class and error.message. It is also now possible to see when an exception leaves the boundary of the span, and if it is caught in an ancestor span without reaching the entry span. NOTE: This “bubbling up” of exceptions will impact the error count when compared to prior behavior for the same trace. It is possible to have a trace that now has span errors without the trace level showing an error.

  If multiple errors occur on the same span, only the most recent error information is added to the attributes. Prior errors on the same span are overwritten.

  These span event attributes conform to ignored errors configuration.

Fixes

• Fixes issue in the MSI installer which prevented the InstrumentAllNETFramework feature selection from working as expected on the command line.
• Fixes issue for Azure App Service environments running on Linux that caused both the application and its Kudu process to be instrumented by the agent. The Kudu process is no longer instrumented.
• Fixes issue when using the ignoreErrors configuration. Previously, when an exception contained a inner exception(s), the ignoreErrors config was only applied to the outer-most exception. Now, both the outer-most and inner-most exception type are considered when evaluating the ignoreErrors configuration.
• Fixes an issue that could cause an exception to occur in the instrumentation for StackExchange Redis. This exception caused the instrumentation to shut down leaving StackExchange Redis uninstrumented.

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.