Node.js agent release notesRSS

Improvements

• Added more tests for transaction naming with Restify.

Fixes

• Fixed issue with tracking external requests to default ports.

  Special thanks to Ryan King for pinpointing the cause of this issue.

• Added extra check for handling arrays of functions when wrapping middleware mounters.

  This fixes a bug with the agent incorrectly assuming that arrays passed as the first argument in middleware would only contain route paths, causing a fatal error.

• The agent now reports the total time of the transaction on transaction events.

New features

• Added an option for using the finally method on promises for instrumentation.

  The promise instrumentation would use Promise#finally if available. This change is in response to Node v10 promises calling then inside their finally method, which caused infinite recursion in the agent's promise instrumentation.

• Added seen/sent/dropped supportability metrics for all event collections.

Improvements

• Refactored harvest cycle into separate class.

  This refactoring eases managing harvested data and re-merging unharvested values on failure.

• No longer download gcc on test suites that do not require it.

Bug fixes

• Updated WebFrameworkShim to handle arrays of routes when wrapping middleware mounters.

  Previously, a transaction that hit a shared middleware (eg, app.use(['/one', '/two'], ...)) would always be tagged with <unknown> in its name, due to the agent not interpreting arrays of paths. Now transaction names will include all paths for a shared middleware, comma-delimited, followed by the current route ('WebTransaction/Expressjs/GET//one,/two/one').

Fixes

• Make require() statements explicitly reference package.json as a .json file.

This solves a problem when requiring/importing newrelic from a Typescript file.

• Check if process.mainModule.filename exists before using in missing config file check.

When the agent is preloaded with Node's --require flag, mainModule is not yet defined when the agent checks for a config file, resulting in a TypeError in the event that no config file exists. Defaulting to the file path being executed in process.argv ensures that the app will not crash when preloaded without a config file.

• Updated dev dependency tap to v12.0.1.
• Fixed identification of errors with express.

Previously the call next('router') was considered an error. This is actually valid usage of express and will no longer generate an error.

• Removed debug.internal_metrics configuration.

This legacy debug configuration was never used since trace-level logging provides everything this did and more.

• Upgraded optional dependency @newrelic/native-metrics to v3.

With this update comes pre-built binaries for Node 5 and 7. GC metrics are also now aggregated in C++ until the agent is ready to harvest them instead of hopping into JS for each event.

• Added additional checks to uninstrumented ensuring that files with names matching instrumented modules do not result in a false uninstrumented status.

For example, some users load config/env info before the agent. In that case, a file responsible for exporting DB config information (config/redis.js), may result in a false uninstrumented status, because the agent would interpret redis.js as the module itself.

Fixes

• Fixed metric merging when using debug.internal_metrics.

  The debug metrics cache would cause timestamps for harvested metrics to get stuck at agent startup. This will no longer happen, and the debug cache is reset each harvest.

Improvements

• Modularized configuration constants to improve readability.

Fixes

• Updated use of fs.unlink without a callback to fs.unlinkSync.

  As of Node v10, the callback is no longer optional, which was causing a false test failure.

• Fixed access to properties on promisified methods.

Improvements

• Optimized unhandledRejection reporting when using async_hooks.
• Replaced all uses of util._extend with Object.assign.
• Completed TODOs regarding the Node 0.10 and 0.12 deprecation.
• Added PriorityQueue serialization benchmarks.

Bug fixes

• The agent no longer resizes the metric timeslice start time to be the earliest start time of the transactions that finish during the timeslice.

• Background transactions created may now be named through API#setTransactionName.

  Previously, the agent didn't respect the transaction naming precedence for background transactions. Background transaction naming behavior is now in line with web transaction behavior.

• Logger no longer tries to create very large log messages.

  When a message is created that would be too large to log, a process warning is emitted.

• The agent will now respect event count limits when merging data from a failed send.

  Previously, when merging data into an event pool the agent wouldn't maintain the size limit of the reservoir.

• Added check for a route prefix when wrapping Hapi route handlers.

  Previously, route prefixes specified via plugin options weren't being included in transaction names. Now, if the agent finds a route prefix associated with a given realm, it is prepended to the route path in the transaction name.

Improvements

• Added PriorityQueue class for collecting events.

  This replaces the Reservoir class for event sampling. Using priority sampling allows the agent to maintain randomness across a given time period while improving the chances that events will be coordinated across Transaction, Error, and Custom event pools.

• The agent will now allow external instrumentation modules to fail in a safe way.

  Previously, the agent would stop running if an externally loaded instrumentation failed for any reason. Due to the way external instrumentations can be updated independently, the agent should allow them to fail and carry on after logging a warning.

• Added the strip_exception_messages.enabled config option.

  The agent can now be configured to redact error messages on collected errors.

• Added the attributes.include_enabled config option.

  The agent can now be configured to disallow attribute include patterns to be specified.

Fixes.

• Updated logic around wrapping route handlers when config object is present.

  Before, the agent would only attempt to wrap config.handler when any config object was present, without defaulting to the root handler if it didn't exist.

Fixes

• BREAKING: Updated the version of https-proxy-agent to v2.x - Dropped support for v0.10 and v0.12 of node.

  The version of https-proxy-agent used in the agent has a known security issue you can read about here: https://snyk.io/vuln/npm:https-proxy-agent:20180402 In order to resolve this issue, the dependency had to be updated to at least v2.2.0, which only supported node versions >=4. The update to this dependency forces the incompatibility of the agent with versions 0.10 and 0.12 of node.

  In order to use use the Node.js agent, please upgrade node to version >=4, or you can continue to use the agent on node versions 0.10 and 0.12 by pinning the agent to v3.

  You can read more about the issue here: https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/using-new-relic/new-relic-security/securi...

Fixes

• Added a type check to attribute validation, restricting values to primitive types (but not undefined).

  Previously the agent was only enforcing byte limits on string values, resulting in overly large arrays being collected. This brings the agent in line with other language agents.

• The DatastoreShim will now respect specified after handlers.

  Previously on methods like DatastoreShim#recordQuery the after handler would be dropped. The property is now correctly propagated to the underlying Shim#record call.

• The agent will now check that a specified parent segment is part of an active segment before running a method under instrumentation.

  Previously the agent would unconditionally run a method under a specified parent. The shim expects the parent to exist and be active, and will throw errors in the case where the parent belongs to an inactive transaction.