Ruby Release Notes

Improvements

Change to default setting for ActiveRecord connection resolution

Due to incompatibilities between the faster ActiveRecord connection resolution released in Ruby agent v6.3.0 and other gems that patch ActiveRecord, backport_fast_active_record_connection_lookup will now be set to false by default. This will result in significant performance improvement.

Recommendation: If your environment includes ActiveRecord, change this setting to true.

Exception: If you are using other gems that measure ActiveRecord performance, they may lose functionality when combined with this setting. If you are unsure whether to enable backport_fast_active_record_connection_lookup, we recommend enabling it in a development environment to make sure other gems that patch ActiveRecord are still working as expected.

Fixes

• Bugfix for ActiveStorage instrumentation error

  Version 6.4.0 of the agent introduced a bug that interfered with ActiveStorage callbacks, resulting in the agent being unable to instrument ActiveStorage operations. ActiveStorage segments are now correctly recorded.

• Bugfix for ActiveRecord 4.1 and 4.2 exception logging

  Version 6.3.0 of the agent introduced a bug that prevented ActiveRecord versions 4.1 and 4.2 from logging exceptions that occurred within a database transaction. This version of the agent restores the exception logging functionality from previous agent versions. Thanks to Oleksiy Kovyrin for the contribution!

Notes

The Ruby agent now enforces a maximum of 10,000 transaction events and custom events and 100 error events per minute.

v6.3.0

• Official Rails 6.0 support

  This version of the agent has been verified against the Rails 6.0.0 release.

  As ActiveRecord 4, 5, and 6 use the same New Relic instrumentation, the disable_active_record_4 and disable_active_record_5 settings in NewRelic.yml are being deprecated in favor of the new disable_active_record_notifications. This new setting will affect the instrumentation of ActiveRecord 4, 5, and 6. The deprecated settings will be removed in a future release.

• Bugfix for newrelic deployments script

  For applications housed in the EU, the newrelic deployments script included with previous versions of the agent would fail with the following message: Deployment not recorded: Application does not exist. This is because the script would attempt to send the deployment notification to the US region. The deployment script now sends deployments to the correct region.

• Faster ActiveRecord connection resolution

  This version of the agent uses the faster ActiveRecord connection resolution that Rails 6.0 uses, even on previous versions of Rails. Thanks to Callum Jones for the contribution!

• Support non-ascii characters in hostnames

  Previous versions of the agent would frequently log warnings like: log writing failed. "\xE2" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 if the hostname contained a non-ascii character. This version of the agent will no longer log these warnings. Thanks to Rafael Petry for the contribution!

v6.1.0

• Performance monitoring on Kubernetes

  This release adds Transaction event attributes that provide context between your Kubernetes cluster and services. For details on the benefits, see this blog post.

• Bugfix for Bunny instrumentation when popping empty queues

  When a customer calls Bunny::Queue#pop on an empty queue, Bunny returns a nil value. Previous Ruby Agent versions raised a NoMethodError when trying to process this result. Now, the agent correctly skips processing for nil values. Thanks to Matt Campbell for the contribution.

v5.7.0

• Ruby 2.6 support

  We have tested the agent with the official release of Ruby 2.6.0 made on December 25, 2018.

• Support for loading Sequel core standalone

  The agent will now enable Sequel instrumentation when an application loads Sequel's core standalone, which does not use the Sequel:Model class. Thanks to Vasily Kolesnikov for the contribution!

• Grape 1.2 support

  With agent versions 5.6 and earlier, Grape 1.2 apps reported their transactions under the name Proc#call instead of the name of the API endpoint. Starting with agent version 5.7, all existing versions of Grape will report the correct transaction name. Thanks to Masato Ohba for the contribution!

v5.5.0

• Bugfix for perform instrumentation with curb gem

  Use of curb's perform method now no longer results in nil headers getting returned.

• Bugfix for parsing Docker container IDs

  The agent now parses Docker container IDs correctly regardless of the cgroup parent.

• Use lazy load hooks for ActiveJob instrumentation

  In some instances the ActiveJob instrumentation could trigger ActiveJob to load before it was initialized by Rails. This could result in configuration changes not being properly applied. The agent now uses lazy load hooks which fixes this issue.

• Documentation improvement

  The config.dot diagram of the agent's configuration settings no longer includes the deleted developer_mode option. Thanks to Yuichiro Kaneko for the contribution!

v5.3.0

• Distributed tracing

  Distributed tracing lets you see the path that a request takes as it travels through your distributed system. By showing the distributed activity through a unified view, you can troubleshoot and understand a complex system better than ever before.

  Distributed tracing is available with an APM Pro or equivalent subscription. To see a complete distributed trace, you need to enable the feature on a set of neighboring services. Enabling distributed tracing changes the behavior of some New Relic features, so carefully consult the transition guide before you enable this feature.

  To enable distributed tracing, set thedistributed_tracing.enabled configuration option to true.

Notes

• Rails 5.2 support

  The Ruby agent has been validated against the latest release of Ruby on Rails!

• Support for newer libraries and frameworks

  We have updated the multiverse suite to test the agent against current versions of several frameworks.

• Add custom_attributes.enabled configuration option

  This option is enabled by default. When it's disabled, custom attributes will not be transmitted on transaction events or error events.

• Fix Grape load order dependency

  The agent will now choose the correct name for Grape transactions even if the customer's app loads the agent before Grape. Thanks to Daniel Doubrovkine for the contribution!

• Add webpacker:compile to blacklisted tasks

  webpacker:compile is commonly used for compiling assets. It has been added to AUTOSTART_BLACKLISTED_RAKE_TASKS in the default configuration. Thanks to Claudio B. for the contribution!

• Make browser instrumentation W3C-compliant

  type="text/javascript" is optional for the <script> tag under W3C. The type attribute has now been removed from browser instrumentation. Thanks to Spharian for the contribution!

• Deferred add_method_tracer calls

  If a third-party library calls add_method_tracer before the agent has finished starting, we now queue these calls and run them when it's safe to do so (rather than skipping them and logging a warning).

• Bugfix for Resque around / before hooks

  In rare cases, the agent was not instrumenting Resque around and before hooks. This version fixes the error.

• Truncation of long stack traces

  Occasionally, long stack traces would cause complications sending data to New Relic. This version truncates long traces to 50 frames (split evenly between the top and bottom of the trace).

Notes

• Initialize New Relic Agent before config initializers

  When running in a Rails environment, the agent registers an initializer that starts the agent. This initializer is now defined to run before config/initializers. Previously, the ordering was not specified for the initializer. This change guarantees the agent will started by the time your initializers run, so you can safely reference the Agent in your custom initializers. Thanks to Tony Ta for the contribution.

• Ruby 2.5 Support

  The Ruby Agent has been verified to run under Ruby 2.5.

• request.uri Collected as an Agent Attribute

  Users can now control the collection of request.uri on errors and transaction traces. Previously it was always collected without the ability to turn it off. It is now an agent attribute that can be controlled via the attributes config. For more information on agent attributes see here.

Notes

• Expected Error API

  The agent now sends up error.expected as an intrinsic attribute on error events and error traces. When you pass expected: true to the notice_error method, both Insights and APM will indicate that the error is expected.

• Typhoeus Hydra Instrumentation

  The agent now has request level visibility for HTTP requests made using Typhoeus Hydra.

• Total Time Metrics are Recorded

  The agent now records Total Time metrics. In an application where segments execute concurrently, the total time can exceed the wall-clock time for a transaction. Users of the new Typhoeus Hydra instrumentation will notice this as changes on the overview page. Immediately after upgrading there will be an alert in the APM dashboard that states: "There are both old and new time metrics for this time window". This indicates that during that time window, some transactions report the total time metrics, while others do not. The message will go away after waiting for enough time to elapse and / or updating the time window.

• Add :message category to set_transaction_name public API method

  The agent now permits the :message category to be passed into the public API method set_transaction_name, which will enable the transaction to be displayed as a messaging transaction.

• Create prepend_active_record_instrumentation config option

  Users may now set the prepend_active_record_instrumentation option in their agent config to install Active Record 3 or 4 instrumentation using Module.prepend rather than alias_method.

• Use Lazy load hooks for ActionController::Base and ActionController::API

  The agent now uses lazy load hooks to hook on ActionController::Base and ActionController::API. Thanks Edouard Chin for the contribution!

• Use Lazy load hooks for ActiveRecord::Base and ActiveRecord::Relation

  The agent uses lazy load hooks when recording supportability metrics for ActiveRecord::Base and ActiveRecord::Relation. Thanks Joseph Haig for the contribution!

• Check that Rails::VERSION is defined instead of just Rails

  The agent now checks that Rails::VERSION is defined since there are cases where Rails is defined but Rails::VERSION is not. Thanks to Alex Riedler and nilsding for the contribution!

• Support fast RPC/direct reply-to in RabbitMQ

  The agent can now handle the pseudo-queue 'amq.rabbitmq.reply-to' in its Bunny instrumentation. Previously, using fast RPC led to a NoMethodError because the reply-to queue was expected to be a Queue object instead of a string.