Node.js agent release notesRSS

Notes

• Express 4 support.

  Express 4 apps now have their transactions named correctly. Errors in the middleware chain are properly recorded.

Notes

• Fix issue where dangling symbolic links in the node_modules folder would crash the environment scraper.

Notes

• Upgrade continuation-local-storage dependency to 3.0.0. The newrelic node module uses cls to help join asynchronous transaction segments. The latest cls module includes a fix that prevents contexts from leaking across transactions.

Notes

• Add high-security compliance for accounts with enterprise security enabled. By default, the agent now works with high-security accounts, whereas previously agents would receive an Access Violation.
• Add a .addCustomParameter(name, value) api call for adding custom parameters to transaction traces, and extend the .noticeError(error, customParameters) for adding additional parameters to error traces.
• Documentation fix in the README.md for ignoring socket.io routes.
• Better support for disabling browser timing headers server side. Previously the agent would not pick up the server change until restart. The agent will now disable browser timing headers as soon as the next harvest cycle.
• Fix a socket hangup error that was causing some agents to fail to handshake with the New Relic servers.

Notes

• Browser monitoring! Real User Monitoring! Which is also known as RUM! Whatever it's called, it allows you to see how long your pages take to load, not just on the server side, but in the browser! Wow! It's super cool! We know a lot of you have been waiting for this, and it's here! It's manually set up with an API call! Check the README for details!
• By default, all communication between New Relic for Node and New Relic's servers is now protected with crisp, clean TLS encryption. To minimize the CPU overhead of running connections over SSL (and it can be configured, see the README and the online documentation for details on how to return to plain HTTP), New Relic for Node is now using a keep-alive connection that will properly pipeline connections, for both HTTP and HTTPS.
• Improved the timings for a large class of MongoDB / Mongoose use cases. If you've encountered the issue where MongoDB trace segments last for an absurdly long duration, this should help.

Notes

Includes a nearly total rewrite of the connection layer that the module uses to communicate with New Relic's servers:

• More useful logs! All of the logging has been reviewed closely to maximize its value and usefulness at pretty much every level. In practice, this means that the messages logged at 'info' and higher should only be for things that are relevant to you as a customer, and at 'debug' and 'trace' should be much more useful for us when we help you isolate issues with New Relic in your applications.
• See data faster! As part of the connection handshake with New Relic, the module will now send any performance metrics gathered during the startup cycle immediately, instead of waiting a minute for the first full harvest cycle.
• Get data to New Relic more reliably! When the module has issues connecting to New Relic, it's more consistent and resilient about holding your performance data for later delivery.
• Use less bandwidth! Performance data delivery to New Relic is now sequential instead of simultaneous. This means that the bandwidth used by New Relic will be less bursty, especially on hosts running many instrumented applications (or cluster workers).
• Better implementation! There were a number of architectural problems with the old version of the connection layer, which (among other things) made it difficult to test. The new version is simpler, has a much cleaner API, and has many, many more tests.

Notes

• Always cast ignored status codes to numbers so that people using environment-variable configuration or strings in config still get error status ignored properly.
• If you disabled server-side configuration, the server was still able to set the value of apdex_t for your app. This was an oversight, and has been corrected.
• Before, if you had request renaming rules, if the end result was the same as the match pattern (mapping /path to /path), they would be silently ignored. This has been fixed.
• MySQL instrumentation handles callback more consistently, so the transaction tracer doesn't get confused and stop tracking transactions with MySQL calls in them.

Notes

• Support for Spumko's Hapi! This support works with both Hapi 1.x and 2.0.0, and like our Express and Restify instrumentation will automatically name transactions after Hapi paths (get it) and time how long it takes to render views.
• Before, transaction naming and ignoring rules didn't work with Express and Restify routes. This has been addressed and the documentation has been clarified. Much gratitude to everyone who helped us figure out how to get this right, and for dealing with the previous, unclear documentation.
• Parameters in the ignored params list weren't being ignored in all cases.
• A very annoyingly chatty log message had its priority level dropped several levels.

Notes:

• Before, there were certain circumstances under which an application would crash without New Relic installed, but wouldn't crash with it. This has been fixed, and applications with New Relic installed now crash consistently. The error tracer is now also considerably simpler.
• Added a security policy. See the new section in README.md or read SECURITY.md.
• Future-proofed the MongoDB instrumentation and prevented the module from breaking GridFS.
• Made a small tweak that should reduce the amount of blocking file I/O done by the module.
• The module's instrumentation and harvest cycle will now not hold the process open in Node 0.9+. This should make it easier for processes to shut themselves down cleanly with New Relic running.
• The environment information gatherer will no longer crash if it tries to read a directory where it's expecting a file.
• Errors thrown during the execution of Express routes or Connect middlewares that were attached to requests that ended in HTTP status codes configured to be ignored by default will now be ignored correctly.
• Made the module play nicer with Node's REPL. It no longer assumes that an application necessarily has a main module.
• A few tweaks were made to support the CoolBeans dependency injection framework.
• Several log messages were demoted to a less chatty level.