Ruby agent release notesRSS

v5.2.0

• Use priority sampling for errors and custom events

  Priority sampling replaces the older reservoir event sampling method. With this change, the agent will maintain randomness across a given time period while improving coordination among transactions, errors, and custom events.

• Bugfix for wrapping datastore operations

  The agent will now complete the process of wrapping datastore operations even if an error occurs during execution of a callback.

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

• SSL connections to New Relic are now mandatory

  Prior to this version, using an SSL connection to New Relic was the default behavior, but could be overridden. SSL connections are now enforced (not overrideable).

• Additional security checking before trying to explain multi-statement SQL queries

  Customer applications might submit SQL queries containing multiple statements (e.g., SELECT * FROM table; SELECT * FROM table). For security reasons, we should not generate explain plans in this situation.

  Although the agent correctly skipped explain plans for these queries during testing, we have added extra checks for this scenario.

• Bugfix for RabbitMQ exchange names that are symbols

  The agent no longer raises a TypeError when a RabbitMQ exchange name is a Ruby symbol instead of a string.

• Bugfix for audit logging to stdout

  Previous agents configured to log to stdout would correctly send regular agent logs to stdout, but would incorrectly send audit logs to a text file named "stdout". This release corrects the error.

• Bugfix for Capistrano deployment notifications on v3.7 and beyond

  Starting with version 3.7, Capistrano uses a different technique to determine a project's version control system. The agent now works correctly with this new behavior. Thanks to Jimmy Zhang for the contribution.

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

• Bugfix for Manual Browser Instrumentation

  There was a previous bug that required setting both rum.enabled: false and browser.auto_instrument: false to completely disable browser monitoring. An attempt to fix this in 4.7.0 resulted in breaking manual browser instrumentation. Those changes have been reverted. We will revisit this issue in an upcoming release.

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

• Public API for External Requests

  The agent now has public API for instrumenting external requests and linking up transactions via cross application tracing. See the API Guide for more details on this new functionality.

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.

Notes

• Include test helper for 3rd party use

  In 4.2.0, all test files were excluded from being packaged in the gem. An agent class method NewRelic::Agent.require_test_helper was used by 3rd party gem authors to test extensions to the agent. The required file is now included in the gem.

• Collect cloud metadata from Azure, GCP, PCF, and AWS cloud platform

  The agent now collects additional metadata when running in AWS, GCP, Azure, and PCF. This information is used to provide an enhanced experience when the agent is deployed on those platforms.

• Install at_exit hook when running JRuby

  The agent now installs an at_exit hook when running JRuby, which wasn't done before because of constraints related to older JRuby versions that are no longer supported.

• User/Utilization and System/Utilization metrics not recorded after Resque forks

  The agent no longer records invalid User/Utilization and System/Utilization metrics, which can lead to negative values, in forks of Resque processes.

• Add identifier field to agent connect settings

  The agent now includes a unique identifier in its connect settings, ensuring that when multiple agents connect to multiple different apps, data are reported for each of the apps.

• Clear transaction state after forking now opt-in

  The agent waits to connect until the first web request when it detects it's running in a forking dispatcher. When clearing the transaction state in this situation we lose the first frame of the transaction and the subsequent trace becomes corrupted. We've made this feature opt-in and is turned off by default. This behavior only affects the first transaction after a dispatcher forks.