Ruby Agent Release Notes

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.

Notes

• Send synthetics headers even when CAT disabled

  The agent now sends synthetics headers whenever they are received from an external request, even if cross-application tracing is disabled.

• Bugfix for DelayedJob Daemonization

  Customers using the delayed_job script that ships with the gem may encounter an IOError with a message indicating the stream was closed. This was due to the agent attempting to write a byte into a Pipe that was closed during the deamonization of the delayed_job script. This issue has been fixed.

• Collect supportability metrics for public API

  The agent now collects Supportability/API/{method} metrics to track usage of all methods in the agent's public API.

• Collect supportability metrics on Module#prepend

  The agent now collects Supportability/PrependedModules/{Module} metrics for ActiveRecord 4 and 5, ActionController 4 and 5, ActionView 4 and 5, ActiveJob 5, and ActionCable 5. These help track the adoption of the Module#prepend method so we can maintain compatibility with newer versions of Ruby and Rails.

• Collect explain plans when using PostGIS ActiveRecord adapter

  The agent will now collect slow SQL explain plans, if configured to, on connections using the PostGIS adapter. Thanks Ari Pollak for the contribution!

• Lazily Intialize New Relic Config

  The agent will lazily initialize the New Relic config. This allows the agent to pickup configuration from environment variables set by dotenv and similar tools.

v4.3.0

• Instrumentation for the Bunny AMQP Client

  The Bunny AMQP Client is now automatically instrumented. The agent will report data for messages sent and received by an application. Data on messages is available in both APM and Insights. Applications connected through a RabbitMQ exchange will now also be visible on Service Maps as part of Cross Application Tracing. See the message queues documentation page for more details.

• Safely normalize external hostnames

  The agent has been updated to check for nil host values before downcasing the hostname. Thanks Rafael Valério for the contribution!

• PageView events will not be generated for ignored transactions

  The agent now checks if transaction is ignored before injecting the New Relic Browser Agent. This will prevent PageView events from being generated for ignored transactions.

• Datastores required explicitly in agent

  The agent has been modified to explicity require the Datastores module whereas previously there were situations where the module could be implicitly defined. Thanks Kevin Griffin for the contribution!

• Clear transaction state after forking

  Previously, if a transaction was started and the process forks, the transaction state survived the fork and #after_fork call in thread local storage. Now, this state is cleared by #after_fork.

• Postgis adapter reports as Postgres for datastores

  The agent now maps the Postgis adapter to Postgres for datastore metrics. Thanks Vojtěch Vondra for the contribution!

• Deprecate :trace_only option

  The NewRelic::Agent.notice_error API has been updated to deprecate the :trace_only option in favor of :expected.

v4.1.0

• Developer Mode removed

  The Ruby Agent's Developer Mode, which provided a very limited view of your application performance data, has been removed. For more information, check out our community forum.

• Support NEW_RELIC_ENV for Rails apps

  Previously, users could set the agent environment with NEW_RELIC_ENV only for non-Rails apps. For Rails app, the agent environment would use whatever the Rails environment was set to. Now, NEW_RELIC_ENV can also be used for Rails apps, so that it is possible to have an agent environment that is different from the Rails environment. Thanks Andrea Campolonghi for the contribution, as well as Steve Schwartz for also looking into this issue!

• Normalization of external hostnames

  Hostnames from URIs used in external HTTP requests are now always downcased to prevent duplicate metrics when only case is different.

v3.18.1

• Ensure Mongo aggregate queries are properly obfuscated

  Instrumentation for the Mongo 2.x driver had a bug where the pipeline attribute of Mongo aggregate queries was not properly obfuscated. Users who have sensitive data in their aggregate queries are strongly encouraged to upgrade to this version of the agent. Users who are unable to upgrade are encouraged to turn off query collection using by setting mongo.capture_queries to false in their newrelic.yml files.

  This release fixes New Relic Security Bulletin NR17-03.

• Early access Redis 4.0 instrumentation

  Our Redis instrumentation has been tested against Redis 4.0.0.rc1.

v3.17.2

• Compatibility with Ruby 2.4.0-preview3

  The Ruby agent has been updated to work on Ruby 2.4.0-preview3.

• Early Access Sinatra 2.0 instrumentation

  Our Sinatra instrumentation has been updated to work with Sinatra 2.0.0.beta2.

• Include controller instrumentation module in Rails 5 API

  The agent now includes the ControllerInstrumentation module into ActionController::API. This gives Rails API controllers access to helper methods like newrelic_ignore in support of the existing event-subscription-based action instrumentation. Thanks Andreas Thurn for the contribution!

• Use Module#prepend for ActiveRecord 5 Instrumentation

  Rails 5 deprecated the use of alias_method_chain in favor of using Module#prepend. Mixing Module#prepend and alias_method_chain can lead to a SystemStackError when an alias_method_chain is applied after a module has been prepended. This should ensure better compatibility between our ActiveRecord Instrumentation and other third party gems that modify ActiveRecord using Module#prepend.

• Use license key passed in to NewRelic::Agent.manual_start

  Previously, the license key passed in when manually starting the agent with NewRelic::Agent.manual_start was not referenced when setting up the connection to report data to New Relic. This is now fixed.

• Account for DataMapper database connection errors

  Our DataMapper instrumentation traces instances of DataObjects::SQLError being raised and removes the password from the URI attribute. However, when DataObjects cannot connect to the database (ex: could not resolve host), it will raise a DataObjects::ConnectionError. This inherits from DataObjects::SQLError but has nil for its URI attribute, since no connection has been made yet. To avoid the password check here on nil, the agent catches and re-raises any instances of DataObjects::ConnectionError explicitly. Thanks Postmodern for this contribution!

• Account for request methods that require arguments

  When tracing a transaction, the agent tries to get the request object from a controller if it wasn't explicitly passed in. However, this posed problems in non-controller transactions with their own request methods defined that required arguments, such as in Resque jobs. This is now fixed.

v3.17.0

• Datastore instance reporting for ActiveRecord

  The agent now collects database instance information for ActiveRecord operations, when using the MySQL and Postgres adapters. This information (database server and database name) is displayed in transaction traces and slow query traces. For more information, see Ruby instance-level database information.

v3.16.2

• Fix for "Unexpected frame in traced method stack" errors

  Our ActiveRecord 4.x instrumentation could have generated "Unexpected frame in traced method stack" errors when used outside of an active transaction (for example, in custom background job handlers). This has been fixed.