Ruby agent release notesRSS

Experimental Rubinius 2.x support

The agent is now being tested against the latest version of Rubinius. While support is still considered experimental, you can track the progress at https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/ruby/rubinius for up to date status.

Capture arguments for Resque and Sidekiq jobs

The agent can optionally record arguments for your Resque and Sidekiq jobs on transaction traces and traced errors. This is disabled by default, but may be enabled by setting resque.capture_params or sidekiq.capture_params.

Thanks to Juan Ignacio Pumarino, Ken Mayer, Paul Henry, and Eric Saxby for their help with this feature!

Supported versions rake task and documentation

We've improved our documentation for what Ruby and gem versions we support. Run rake newrelic:supported_versions or see the latest agent's versions at https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/ruby/supported-frameworks.

ActiveRecord 4.0 explain plans for JRuby and Rubinius

The agent's ActiveRecord 4.0 instrumentation could not gather SQL explain plans on JRuby by default because of a dependency on ObjectSpace, which isn't available by default. This has been fixed.

Fix for Curb http_put_with_newrelic

A bug in the agent caused PUT calls in the Curb gem to crash. This has been fixed. Thanks to Michael D'Auria and Kirk Diggler for the contributions!

Fix for head position on RUM injection

Certain unusual HTML documents resulted in browser monitoring injecting incorrect content. Thanks Alex McHale for the contribution!

Specify the Content-Type header in developer mode

Thanks Jared Ning for the contribution!

Percentiles and Histograms

The Ruby Agent now captures data that provides percentile and histogram views in the New Relic UI.

Missing Resque transaction traces

A bug in 3.6.8.164 prevented transaction traces in Resque jobs from being communicated back to New Relic. 3.6.8.168 fixes this.

Retry on initial connect.

Failure to contact New Relic on agent start-up would not properly retry. This has been fixed.

Fix potential memory leak on failure to send to New Relic.

3.6.8.164 introduced a potential memory leak when transmission of some kinds of data to New Relic servers failed. 3.6.8.168 fixes this.

X-Ray Sessions support

X-Ray Sessions provide more targeted transaction trace samples and thread profiling for web transactions. For full details see our X-Ray sessions documentation at https://newrelic.com/docs/site/xray-sessions.

CPU metrics re-enabled for JRuby >= 1.7.0

To work around a JRuby bug, the Ruby agent stopped gathering CPU metrics on that platform. With the bug fixed, the agent can gather those metrics again. Thanks Bram de Vries for the contribution!

Additional locking option for Resque

There have been reports of worker process deadlocks in Resque when using the Ruby agent. An optional lock is now available to avoid those deadlocks. See https://newrelic.com/docs/ruby/resque-instrumentation for more details.

HTTP connection setup timeout

HTTP initialization in the agent lacked an appropriate timeout, leading to dropouts in reporting under certain network error conditions.

Unnecessary requests from Resque jobs

An issue causing Resque jobs to unnecessarily make requests against New Relic servers was fixed.

Resque-pool support

Resque processes started via the resque-pool gem weren't recognized by the Ruby agent. The agent now starts correctly in those worker processes.

Environment-based configuration

All settings in newrelic.yml can now be configured via environment variables. See https://newrelic.com/docs/ruby/ruby-agent-configuration for full details.

Fix compatibility issues with excon and curb instrumentation

This release of the agent fixes a warning seen under certain circumstances with the excon gem (most notably, when excon was used by fog), as well as a bug with the curb instrumentation that conflicted with the feedzirra gem.

Allow license key to be set by Capistrano variables

A license key can be passed via a Capistrano variable where previously it could only be in newrelic.yml. Thanks Chris Marshall for the contribution!

Make HTTP client instrumentation aware of "Host" request header

If a "Host" header is set explicitly on an HTTP request, that hostname will be used for external metrics. Thanks Mislav Marohnić for the contribution!

Fix ActiveSupport::Concern warnings with MethodTracer

Including NewRelic::Agent::MethodTracer in a class using Concerns could cause deprecation warnings. Thanks Mike Połtyn for the contribution!

Fix Authlogic constant name

Code checking for the Authlogic module was using in the wrong case. Thanks Dharam Gollapudi for the contribution!

HTTPClient and Curb support

The Ruby agent now supports the HTTPClient and Curb HTTP libraries! Cross application tracing and more is fully supported for these libraries. For more details see https://newrelic.com/docs/ruby/ruby-http-clients.

Sinatra startup improvements

In earlier agent versions, newrelic_rpm had to be required after Sinatra to get instrumentation. Now the agent should start when your Sinatra app starts up in rackup, thin, unicorn, or similar web servers.

Puma clustered mode support

Clustered mode in Puma was not reporting data without manually adding a hook to Puma's configuration. The agent will now automatically add this hook.

SSL certificate verification

Early versions of the agent's SSL support provided an option to skip certificate verification. This option has been removed.

Rails 4.0 Support

The Ruby agent is all set for the recent general release of Rails 4.0! We've been tracking the RC's, and that work paid off. Versions 3.6.5 and 3.6.4 of the Ruby agent should work fine with Rails 4.0.0.

Excon and Typhoeus support

The Ruby agent now supports the Excon and Typhoeus HTTP libraries! For more details see https://newrelic.com/docs/ruby/ruby-http-clients.

Exception list

We've improved exception message handling for applications running in high-security mode. Enabling 'high_security' now removes exception messages entirely rather than simply obfuscating any SQL.

By default this feature affects all exceptions, although you can configure an allow list of exceptions for messages you want to remain intact.

More details: https://newrelic.com/docs/ruby/ruby-agent-configuration

Fix a race condition affecting some Rails applications at startup

Some Rails applications using 'newrelic_rpm' were affected by a race condition at startup that manifested as an error when model classes with associations were first loaded. The cause of these errors has been addressed by moving the generation of the agent's 'EnvironmentReport' on startup from a background thread to the main thread.

Better Sinatra Support

A number of improvements have been made to our Sinatra instrumentation. More details: https://newrelic.com/docs/ruby/sinatra-support-in-the-ruby-agent

Sinatra instrumentation has been updated to more accurately reflect the final route that was actually executed, taking pass and conditions into account.

New Relic middlewares for error collection, real user monitoring, and cross application tracing are automatically inserted into the middleware stack.

Ignoring routes, similar to functionality available to Rails controllers, is now available in Sinatra as well.

Routes in 1.4 are properly formatting in transaction names. Thanks Zachary Anker for the contribution!

Padrino Support

Along with improving our support of Sinatra, we've also extended that to supporting Padrino, a framework that builds on Sinatra. Web transactions should show up in New Relic now for Padrino apps automatically. The agent has been tested against the latest Padrino in versions 0.11.x and 0.10.x.

Main overview graph only shows web transactions

In the past database times from background jobs mixed with other web transaction metrics in the main overview graph. This often skewed graphs. A common workaround was to send background jobs to a separate application, but that should no longer be necessary as the overview graphs now only represent web transactions.