Python agent release notesRSS

Notes

This release of the Python agent is a bug fix release that addresses several outstanding issues. In addition, the agent's instrumentation for the Pyramid web framework was updated to handle changes introduced in version 1.7 of Pyramid.

The agent can be installed using easy_install/pip/distribute via the Python Package Index or can be downloaded directly from our download site.

For a list of known issues with the Python agent, see Status of the Python agent.

New Feature

• Support for Pyramid 1.7

  In version 1.7 of the Pyramid web framework, the ViewDeriver class was removed and replaced with a custom view pipeline, composed with view derivers. This required a change to where the agent applied it's instrumentation, since we were previously instrumenting the ViewDeriver class.

Bug Fixes

• Gevent and Python 3.4+

  When running the agent with gevent in Python 3.4+, the agent would throw an AttributeError when accessing the _sleep attribute in the threading module, which was removed in Python 3.4. The agent now handles this properly.

• Possible missing application exceptions in APM Error Analytics

  Using the record_exception() API, it is possible to record an exception against the application, but outside of a transaction. If there was a time window in which no transaction exceptions were recorded, but only application exceptions were recorded, then no exceptions would be displayed when viewing that time window in APM Error Analytics. With this release, application exceptions show up as expected, whether or not transaction exceptions were also recorded.

• CherryPyWSGIServer and keyword arguments

  Previously, the agent would fail to instrument CherryPyWSGIServer correctly when it was initialized using keyword arguments. That is now handled correctly.

• Missing attributes in Transaction Events

  In version 2.60.0.46 of the agent, two response header attributes were renamed, but they were not added to Transaction Events as they should have been.

  • response.headers.contentLength
  • response.headers.contentType

  These attributes are now included in Transaction Events.

Changed Feature

• Capture port for all HTTP requests to External Services

  Prior to this release, the agent would capture the port for HTTP requests to external services for only some of the HTTP libraries that the agent instruments. Notably, the port was missing when using these libraries directly: httplib, httplib2, and urllib3. The agent now captures the port for these libraries.

Notes

This release of the Python agent is a bug fix release which improves our introductory support for instrumenting Tornado 4 applications. Full details about the status of our Tornado 4 support can be found on our Introductory Tornado 4 support page.

The agent can be installed using easy_install/pip/distribute via the Python Package Index or can be downloaded directly from our download site.

For a list of known issues with the Python agent, see Status of the Python agent.

New Feature

• New attributes captured for Tornado 4 applications

  The following attributes are now captured for requests made to Tornado 4 applications:

  • request.headers.accept
  • request.headers.host
  • port

Bug Fixes

• Potentially too many metrics created for tornado.httpclient function traces

  The tornado.httpclient instrumentation for Tornado 4 applications could cause a "metric grouping issue" in the function traces it created, if it was used to make requests to a large number of unique URLs. To address this issue, the URL is no longer included in the name of the function trace.

• Transactions in Tornado 4 applications could be created with invalid agent settings

  In the prior release, if a transaction started before the agent had completed registration with the collector, the transaction could have invalid settings, which would result in various errors in the agent log, including an AttributeError when an external call was made during the transaction. These errors only happened at application startup until registration was complete. With this release, transactions cannot start with invalid settings.

• The httplib2 instrumentation did not process the cross application tracing headers in the response

  Failing to process the response headers resulted in the inability to link to cross application tracing details in the Transaction Trace Details view, as well as missing ExternalTransaction and ExternalApp metrics. Now, the httplib2 instrumentation in the agent processes the cross application tracing headers correctly.

Known Tornado 4 Limitations Addressed

• Explain plans for queries made with psycopg2's "async mode" are disabled automatically

  Currently, the Python agent does not support explain plans for queries made in psycopg2's "async mode." In the prior release, it was necessary to add the configuration setting transaction_tracer.explain_enabled = false to disable explain plans, or else errors would occur during data harvest, potentially causing loss of data. With this release, the agent disables explain plans automatically when async mode is detected.

• Added support for synthetics transaction traces

  Tornado 4 applications will now recognize incoming requests from synthetics and generate transaction traces for Synthetic requests.

Status of Tornado 4 Support

A current list of known limitations can be found on our Introductory Tornado 4 support page. No new known limitations have been added since our introductory release (v2.62.0.47). In the next few releases, we plan to continue addressing these issues.

Notes

This release of the Python agent adds introductory support for instrumenting Tornado 4 applications.

The agent can be installed using easy_install/pip/distribute via the Python Package Index or can be downloaded directly from our download site.

For a list of known issues with the Python agent, see Status of the Python agent.

New Feature

• Introductory Support for Tornado 4. (See below for details.)

Bug Fix

• Django Template Tags for Browser Monitoring Fixed for Django 1.9

For manual insertion of the browser monitoring javascript for page load timing, the Python agent offers two Django template tags: newrelic_browser_timing_header and newrelic_browser_timing_footer.

Starting in Django version 1.9, the output of simple_tag is now escaped, which results in the browser monitoring javascript being included as escaped text in the HTML output. To fix this issue, the agent now uses django.utils.safestring:mark_safe() to prevent automatic escaping for these two template tags.

Introductory Support for Tornado 4

New Relic is pleased to announce introductory support for Tornado 4. While not all features are supported at this point, providing it at an early stage allows interested customers to preview our Tornado 4 support, and provide feedback on what works well and what doesn't.

For detailed information about the introductory Tornado 4 support, including Supported Features, Design Decisions, and Known Limitations, see Introductory Tornado 4 support.

Status of Tornado 4 Support

The following is a list of known limitations for our Tornado 4 support as it exists in the current version of the agent. In the next few releases, we plan to address these issues.

• If you use psycopg2 in aynchronous mode, you must disable explain plans in the Python agent, or else the agent will throw an error when it attempts to run an explain plan query. Add this setting to your newrelic.ini configuration file:

  transaction_tracer.explain_enabled = false

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• Metric names should be more consistent. For a method of a class, the metric name should contain both the name of the class and the method, but sometimes, the metric name will be missing the class name.

• The nesting of segments in a Transaction Trace should be improved. Right now, transaction traces give a good indication of the order that callbacks run on the IOLoop, but they do not group together callbacks that belong to the same coroutine, nor do they show how callbacks relate to each other.

• Transaction Traces mislabel time spent in "Application code". Because the Tornado 4 instrumentation traces all callbacks that run on the IOLoop, nearly everything that happens in a transaction is recorded. Very little is uninstrumented "Application code". When you see "Application code" time in a transaction trace, that usually means that the IOLoop was either busy running callbacks belonging to another transaction, or was waiting and not doing any work. This will be made clearer in a future release.

• In the current version of the agent, the Total Time for a transaction will always equal the duration of the transaction. In future versions, we may begin measuring the time spent waiting for asynchronous External Traces and Datastore Traces to return results, which will increase the Total Time for a transaction, making it possible to have a Total Time greater than the duration of the transaction.

• When using tornado.httpclient, no Cross Application Tracing headers are added to the outgoing requests. (This is true for both HTTPClient and AsyncHTTPClient.) That means that the application that the httpclient connects to will not show up in any of the following: trace maps, transaction maps, and service maps.

• Asynchronous External Traces only trace the initial HTTP connection. They do not trace the time for the response to come back.

• If you monitor your Tornado 4 application with synthetic monitoring, the Python agent will not capture transaction traces for synthetic checks, so you will be unable to connect your synthetic results to APM transaction traces.

• Measuring thread utilization is disabled for Tornado applications.

• Exceptions thrown in RequestHandler.initialize() are not recorded.

• Use of Tornado's built-in multi-process mode to start multiple processes and have them all share the same port is untested and unsupported.

• Use of tornado.wsgi.WSGIAdapter and tornado.wsgi.WSGIContainer is untested and unsupported.

• Use of tornado.platform.asyncio to bridge between asyncio and Tornado IOLoop is untested and unsupported. Currently, the agent only supports the use of the tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.

• Use of the async and await keywords is untested and unsupported.

• Integration with Twisted is untested and unsupported.

Notes

This release of the Python agent enables the ability to add Custom Insights Events through a new record_custom_event() API.

The agent can be installed using easy_install/pip/distribute via the Python Package Index or can be downloaded directly from our download site.

For a list of known issues with the Python agent, see Status of the Python agent.

New Feature

• Custom Events

Prior to this release, the Python agent had the capability to record two types of Insights events automatically: Transaction and TransactionError events. In addition, custom attributes could be added to those events. Now, with the addition of the record_custom_event() API, it is possible to define your own custom event types, enabling greater flexibility about what types of events you can view and query in Insights.

For details, see the Insights documentation on Inserting Custom Events.

Changed Feature

• Attributes renamed

Two attributes have been renamed, in order to be consistent with the naming convention of other New Relic agents. The affected attributes are:

• response.headers.contentLength (was response.contentLength)
• response.headers.contentType (was response.contentType)

Notes

This release of the Python agent is a hotfix release to address a problem where the agent could fail to validate the SSL certificate of the New Relic collector in some environments.

The agent can be installed using easy_install/pip/distribute via the Python Package Index or can be downloaded directly from our download site.

For a list of known issues with the Python agent, see Status of the Python agent.

Bug Fix

If the Python agent was used in an environment where the certifi package was installed, the Python agent would use the certifi CA certificates bundle to validate the certificate of the New Relic collector. However, the latest release of certifi (November 20, 2015) removed some older CA certificates with 1024-bit keys.

The SSL certificate for the New Relic collector is cross-signed with both a 1024-bit certificate and a 2048-bit certificate, but in some circumstances, the stronger root certificate was not used for validation. When the 1024-bit certificate was no longer included in the certifi bundle, SSL validation would fail. Affected customers would see warnings in their agent log stating "Data collector is not contactable" due to an SSLError.

To address this issue, the agent no longer uses the certifi CA certificates bundle, nor the certificates bundled with requests. Instead, it only uses the CA bundle included with the agent to validate the New Relic collector certificate.

Notes

This release of the Python agent is a hotfix release to address a problem where the package failed to install under certain circumstances.

The agent can be installed using easy_install/pip/distribute via the Python Package Index or can be downloaded directly from our download site.

For a list of known issues with the Python agent, see Status of the Python agent.

Bug Fix

The README.rst file contained non-ASCII characters, which could result in a UnicodeDecodeError during installation. Those characters have been removed.

Notes

This release of the Python agent reports error events to Insights and captures enhanced error data to support the new Advanced Error Analytics feature in APM.

The agent can be installed using easy_install/pip/distribute via the Python Package Index or can be downloaded directly from our download site.

For a list of known issues with the Python agent, see Status of the Python agent.

New Feature

• Error Events

The Python agent now sends TransactionError events for Advanced Error Analytics, which power the new APM Errors functionality (currently in Beta). This allows users to create charts that facet and filter their error data by attributes, as well as explore their error events in Insights. For details, see the APM Errors documentation.

Changed Feature

• Additional Attributes collected

The agent now collects additional attributes for web transactions:

• HTTP request headers: Host and Accept
• HTTP response header :Content-Length

Bug Fix

• Improved unicode support for exception messages

Unicode exception messages will still be preserved, even if sys.setdefaultencoding() has been called to change the default encoding.

Notes

This release of the Python agent adds much more flexibility around what attributes are sent to New Relic, and where they are displayed.

The agent can be installed using easy_install/pip/distribute via the Python Package Index or can be downloaded directly from our download site.

For a list of known issues with the Python agent, see Status of the Python agent.

New Feature

• Flexible capturing of attributes

Attributes are key-value pairs that contain additional information to be added to an event or transaction. These key-value pairs can be viewed within transaction traces in New Relic APM, traced errors in New Relic APM, transaction events in Insights, and page views in Insights.

A number of new configuration settings have been introduced to allow you to customize exactly which attributes will be sent to each of these destinations.

For details, see Python agent attributes.

Deprecated Settings

Several configuration settings have been deprecated. The most commonly used of the deprecated settings are capture_params and ignored_params. It is still possible to achieve the same functionality as the old settings by using the new attributes.include and attributes.exclude settings. For examples, see Python agent attribute examples.

A complete list of deprecated settings can be found in deprecated configuration settings.

While the usage of deprecated settings is still supported, we recommend upgrading your configuration to use the new settings as soon as possible.

Changed Feature

Previously, it was possible to save a list, dict, or tuple as an attribute value that could be displayed in transaction and error traces. However, these same attributes could not be displayed in Insights events. Now, all attributes are handled in a consistent manner, which means that all attribute values must be one of the following types:

Python 2: str, unicode, int, long, float, bool
Python 3: str, bytes, int, float, bool

All values which are not one of these types are automatically converted by calling str(value).

Notes

This release of the Python agent adds the ability to strip exception messages from error traces, in order to prevent the inadvertent capture of sensitive information.

The agent can be installed using easy_install/pip/distribute via the Python Package Index or can be downloaded directly from our download site.

New Features

• Allowing Exception Messages

Because an exception message can contain sensitive information, the agent now provides the ability to strip exception messages before sending error traces to APM. Exception messages will be stripped automatically in high-security mode.

For exception messages you know to be safe, you can add them to an allow list so that those messages are passed unaltered to APM. Two new configuration settings control this feature: strip_exception_messages.enabled and strip_exception_messages.whitelist.

Bug Fixes

• capture_request_params API disabled for high-security mode

When operating in high-security mode, the agent should not capture query string parameters. However, prior to this release, it was possible to call newrelic.agent.capture_request_params(flag=True), even if the agent was in high-security mode, and the agent would capture and report query string parameters. Now, the capture_request_params API call does not override the capture_params setting when the agent is in high-security mode, so query parameters are not captured.