.NET agent release notesRSS

New Features

• Infinite Tracing on New Relic Edge

  This release adds support for Infinite Tracing on New Relic Edge. Infinite Tracing observes 100% of your distributed traces and provides visualizations for the most actionable data so you have the examples of errors and long-running traces so you can better diagnose and troubleshoot your systems.

  You configure your agent to send traces to a trace observer in New Relic Edge. You view your distributed traces through the New Relic’s UI. There is no need to install a collector on your network.

  Infinite Tracing is currently available on a sign-up basis. If you would like to participate, please contact your sales representative.

  Agent version 8.30 introduces significant performance enhancements to Infinite Tracing. To use Infinite Tracing, please upgrade to version 8.30 or later.

• Error attributes now added to each span that exits with an error or exception

  Error attributes error.class and error.message are now included on the span event in which an error or exception was noticed, and, in the case of unhandled exceptions, on any ancestor spans that also exit with an error. The public API method NoticeError now attaches these error attributes to the currently executing span.

  Spans with error details are now highlighted red in the Distributed Tracing UI, and error details will expose the associated error.class and error.message. It is also now possible to see when an exception leaves the boundary of the span, and if it is caught in an ancestor span without reaching the entry span. NOTE: This “bubbling up” of exceptions will impact the error count when compared to prior behavior for the same trace. It is possible to have a trace that now has span errors without the trace level showing an error.

  If multiple errors occur on the same span, only the most recent error information is added to the attributes. Prior errors on the same span are overwritten.

  These span event attributes conform to ignored errors configuration.

Fixes

• Fixes issue in the MSI installer which prevented the InstrumentAllNETFramework feature selection from working as expected on the command line.
• Fixes issue for Azure App Service environments running on Linux that caused both the application and its Kudu process to be instrumented by the agent. The Kudu process is no longer instrumented.
• Fixes issue when using the ignoreErrors configuration. Previously, when an exception contained a inner exception(s), the ignoreErrors config was only applied to the outer-most exception. Now, both the outer-most and inner-most exception type are considered when evaluating the ignoreErrors configuration.
• Fixes an issue that could cause an exception to occur in the instrumentation for StackExchange Redis. This exception caused the instrumentation to shut down leaving StackExchange Redis uninstrumented.

Upgrading

• Follow standard procedures to update the .NET agent.
• If you are upgrading from a particularly old agent, review the list of major changes and procedures to upgrade legacy .NET agents.

New Features

• Thread profiling support for Linux

  Thread profiling on Linux will be supported on .NET Core 3.0 or later applications when running .NET agent version 8.23 or later. Triggering a thread profile is done from the Thread profiler page in APM.

• Accessing Span-Specific information using the .NET Agent API

  New property, CurrentSpan has been added to IAgent and ITransaction. It returns an object implementing ISpan which provides access to span-specific functions within the API.

• Adding Custom Span Attributes using the .NET Agent API

  New method, AddCustomAttribute(string, object) has been added to ISpan.

  • This new method accepts and supports all data-types.
  • Further information may be found within .NET Agent API documentation.
  • Adding custom attributes to spans requires distributed tracing and span events to be enabled. See .NET agent configuration

Fixes

• Fixes issue where adding multiple custom attributes on a Transaction using ITransaction.AddCustomAttribute causes the agent to ignore additional attempts to add custom attributes to any transaction.
• Fixes issue that prevented Custom Events from being sent to New Relic until the agent shuts down.
• Fixes issue that can cause asynchronous Redis calls in an ASP.NET MVC application to report an inflated duration.

Upgrading

• Follow standard procedures to update the .NET agent.
• If you are upgrading from a particularly old agent, review the list of major changes and procedures to upgrade legacy .NET agents.

New Features

• Adding custom transaction attributes using the .NET Agent API

  New method, AddCustomAttribute(string, object) has been added to ITransaction.

  • This new method accepts and supports all data types.
  • Method AddCustomParameter(string, IConvertable) is still available with limited data-type support; however, this method should be considered obsolete and will be removed in a future release of the agent API.
  • Further information may be found within .NET Agent API documentation.

• Enhanced type support for RecordCustomEvent and NoticeError API methods.

  APIs for recording exceptions and custom events now support values of all types.

  • The NoticeError API method has new overloads that accept an IDictionary<string, object>.
  • The RecordCustomEvent methods have been modified to handle all types of data. In that past, they only handled string and float types.
  • Further information may be found within .NET agent API documentation.

• New attributes on span events

  • Spans created for external HTTP calls now include the http.statusCode attribute representing the status code of the call.
  • Spans created for calls to a datastore now include the db.collection attribute. For instance, this will be the table name for a call to MS SQL Server.

• Ability to exclude attributes from span events

  Attributes on span events (e.g., http.url) can now be excluded via configuration. See .NET agent configuration for further information.

Fixes

• New Relic distributed tracing relies on propagating trace and span identifiers in the headers of external calls (e.g., an HTTP call). These identifiers now only contain lowercase alphanumeric characters. Previous versions of the .NET agent used uppercase alphanumeric characters. The usage of uppercase alphanumeric characters can break traces when calling downstream services also monitored by a New Relic agent that supports W3C trace context (New Relic's .NET agent does not currently support W3C trace context. Support for W3C trace context for .NET will be in an upcoming release). This is only a problem if a .NET application is the originator of the trace.

Upgrading

• Follow standard procedures to update the .NET agent.
• If you are upgrading from a particularly old agent, review the list of major changes and procedures to upgrade legacy .NET agents.

New Features

• Support for Real Time Streaming

  • Event data is now sent to New Relic every five seconds, instead of every minute. As a result, transaction, error, and custom events will now be available in New Relic and Insights dashboards in near real time. For more information on how to view your events with a five-second refresh, see the real time streaming documentation.
  • Note that the overall limits on how many events can be sent per minute have not changed. Also, span events, metrics, and trace data is unaffected, and will still be sent every minute.

Fixes

• Fixes security vulnerability NR20-01 which may cause SQL parameter values to appear in the agent log file when the logging level is set to Debug or Finest and the calling application supplies SQL parameters without a @ prefix.
• Fixes an issue where Explain Plans are not generated for database commands with parameters that do not have the @ prefix on the name.
• Fixes an issue with the timing of some async MongoDB driver methods.

Upgrading

• Follow standard procedures to update the .NET agent.
• If you are upgrading from a particularly old agent, review the list of major changes and procedures to upgrade legacy .NET agents.

This is a security-only release for the 6.x agents that support legacy frameworks (.NET version 4.5 and lower). If you are on .NET version 4.5 or higher, or if you are on .NET Core, use the 8.x or later agent versions.

Fixes

• Fixes security vulnerability NR20-01 which may cause SQL parameter values to appear in the agent log file when the logging level is set to Debug or Finest and the calling application supplies SQL parameters without a @ prefix.
• Fixes an issue where Explain Plans are not generated for database commands with parameters that do not have the @ prefix on the name.

Upgrading

• Follow standard procedures to update the .NET agent.
• If you are upgrading from a particularly old agent, review the list of major changes and procedures to upgrade legacy .NET agents.

New Features

• Enables ability to migrate to Configurable Security Policies (CSP) on a per agent basis for accounts already using High-security mode (HSM). When both HSM and CSP are enabled for an account, an agent (this version or later) can successfully connect with either high_security: true or the appropriate security_policies_token configured.

Fixes

• Fixes a number of issues caused when Application Initialization has been enabled in Internet Information Services (IIS) (a.k.a. AlwaysOn in Azure App Services). The issues include the inability for the agent to name an app or possibly not instrument an app at all when app pool allow/deny listing has been applied via newrelic.config. In an Azure App Services scenario inadvertent instrumentation of the Kudu process could also occur. This was caused by the agent relying on the IIS environment variable APP_POOL_ID. When Application Initialization or AlwaysOn are enabled, the APP_POOL_ID environment variable is unavailable to the agent. The agent now also attempts to parse the command line of the w3wp.exe process to identify the application pool the app is running under.
• Improves the handling of OperationCanceledException errors when trying to connect or send data to New Relic.
• Fixes a problem with instrumenting ASP.NET Core applications that can occur when the Microsoft.AspNetCore.Diagnostics.Abstraction assembly is not available.
• Fixes a problem where WCF Instrumentation may shut-down due to an unexpected error.
• Fixes a problem that can cause the agent to fail to shutdown completely when a shutdown is triggered while the agent is still in its startup process.
• Fixes a problem with the GetLinkingMetadata API method that could cause an expected KeyValuePair to not be included in the Dictionary.

Upgrading

• Follow standard procedures to update the .NET agent.
• If you are upgrading from a particularly old agent, review the list of major changes and procedures to upgrade legacy .NET agents.

Fixes

• [.NET Core] Fixes a problem that could cause some .NET Core 3.0 applications to hang if they were configured with an invalid license key.

Upgrading

• Follow standard procedures to update the .NET agent.
• If you are upgrading from a particularly old agent, review the list of major changes and procedures to upgrade legacy .NET agents.

New Features

• Improved support for WCF.

  • Support for Task-based (TAP) service calls.
  • Distributed Tracing and CAT are automatically supported for HTTP-based binding types (such as BasicHTTP, WebHTTP, WSHTTP).
  • Non-HTTP binding types (such as NetTCP, MSMQ, Named Pipes) are instrumented, but do not automatically support Distributed Tracing and CAT.

• [.NET Core] Adds support for .NET Core 3.1 beginning with preview 1.

• Performance Metrics: The .Net Agent collects information about application performance in the following areas.

  • Memory and CPU Utilization
  • Garbage Collection
  • Threadpool Usage and Throughput

  Please refer to online documentation for further information.

Fixes

• [.NET Framework] Fix an issue where reading application settings from web.config or app.config could prevent the agent from starting up.
• [.NET Framework] Fix an issue where the agent caused an application to deadlock when using a ConfigurationBuilder. This was commonly seen in applications using the AzureKeyVaultConfigBuilder.
• Fix an issue introduced in 8.16 where Memory and CPU metrics failed to update.

Upgrading

• Follow standard procedures to update the .NET agent.
• If you are upgrading from a particularly old agent, review the list of major changes and procedures to upgrade legacy .NET agents.

New Features

• .NET agent installation procedures have been simplified for Windows environments enabling you to more easily monitor .NET Core applications. Our standard installation procedures use a single MSI installer to install support for both .NET Framework and .NET Core applications. If you previously only monitored .NET Framework applications then nothing changes for you. If you were previously installing our .NET Core support using one of our manual install procedures you may need to port any custom modifications you have made to your newrelic.config and any XML custom instrumentation you have applied to the new install location.
• Trace Accessors APIs: two new API calls to obtain information used to support tracing.
  • TraceMetadata - returns a property with access to the following:
    • TraceId - the currently executing trace's identifier.
    • SpanId - the currently executing span's identifier.
    • IsSampled - returns whether or not the current transaction is part of a sampled distributed trace.
  • GetLinkingMetadata - returns key/value pairs which can be used to correlate this application in the New Relic backend.

Fixes

• [.NET Framework] Fix an issue in WCF instrumentation where multiple transactions were created for a call to a WCF service endpoint that used the begin/end async pattern.
• [.NET Core] Fix an application crash bug on Alpine Linux.

Upgrading

• Follow standard procedures to update the .NET agent.
• If you are upgrading from a particularly old agent, review the list of major changes and procedures to upgrade legacy .NET agents.