Infrastructure agent release notesRSS

Notes

A new version of the agent has been released. Follow standard procedures to update your Infrastructure agent.

Added

• New StorageSample metrics. Please refer to the New Relic event data dictionary for a detailed description of them.
  • Linux-only storage metrics: inodesFree, inodesUsed, inodesTotal and inodesUsedPercent.
  • Windows-only storage metrics: avgQueueLen, avgReadQueueLen, avgWriteQueueLen and currentQueueLen.

Security notes

• Windows package gets flagged by Windows-Defender on some machines. Use newer versions instead.

Notes

A new version of the agent has been released. Follow standard procedures to update your Infrastructure agent.

Bugfixes

• Fixed crash behaviour while stopping the agent under certain circumstances. Ie, containerised agent service stop could trigger a crash dumping a trace.
  • Crash on stop should not be harmful for the agent itself or remaining data, but a non zero exit code and/or crash backtrace output might affect 3rd parties.

Notes

A new version of the agent has been released. Follow standard procedures to update your Infrastructure agent.

Bugfixes

• Fix log obfuscation feature applying to integration received arguments.
  • Bug was introduced on agent v1.4.0 affecting some OHIs arguments.
  • Symptom was: OHI receives obfuscated PASSWORD env vars with value HIDDEN.

Notes

A new version of the agent has been released. Follow standard procedures to update your Infrastructure agent.

Added

• Optional JSON log format (doc coming soon).

Changed

• Startup info and errors are now logged into the log file since the beginning.
• Log messages prior to configuration being fully loaded.
• Improved error catching and logging on fatal failures.
• Improved log messages. Most of the messages are now static, not inlined with context values, so messages are more easily filterable/greppable, and context fields are provided attached.

Example old message:

Containerized agent found with container id VALUE

Example new message:

Containerized agent found in container
      containerID: VALUE

Notes

A new version of the agent has been released. Follow standard procedures to update your Infrastructure agent.

Changed

• Allow enabling http-server (required for Statsd integration) to work in forwarder mode.

Notes

A new version of the agent has been released. Follow standard procedures to update your Infrastructure agent.

Added

Improved logging and troubleshooting features:

• Logging agent config options at startup (with obfuscation of sensitive data).
• Logging all the config options of the loaded integrations at startup (with obfuscation of sensitive data).
• Improve log messages related to integrations.
• Integrations health checks
• New binary called newrelic-infra-ctl for sending notifications to the agent for:
  • Enabling verbose logs for 5 minutes
  • Integrations health check

Agent daemon notification

For notifying the agent to perform actions, the newrelic-infra-ctl command was created. It has the sole responsibility of sending a notification to the agent process that's running inside the host.

In Linux this communication happens via POSIX signals. newrelic-infra-ctl first tries to find if there is an agent process running. If it finds it, it checks if the process is running inside a Docker container. This is because signals to Docker containers are sent with the docker kill command. Once it knows the pid and the signaling method to use, it sends a SIGUSR1 signal to the agent. The agent just has to set a signal handler for when it receives a SIGUSR1.

In Windows, things are a little different. The only signals that we could send to the process were exit signals. In Windows processes communicate by sending messages to their respective windows, but you might be wondering (as I was), the agent is a daemon process so it doesn't have a window. The solution, easy, a hidden window. On startup the agent creates a hidden window, and sets a handler that listens for messages that arrive in that window. newrelic-infra-ctl finds that windows and sends messages to it.

Changed

• Decorate samples with reportingAgent attribute and replace loopback address if found in reportingEndpoint and reportingEntityKey samples attributes.
• Do not log config.pid_file property in the Windows agent.

Notes

A new version of the agent has been released. Follow standard procedures to update your Infrastructure agent.

Changes

• Minor internal architectural improvements. No impact expected.

Notes

A new version of the agent has been released. Follow standard procedures to update your Infrastructure agent.

Features

• Add support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and CentOS 8

Improvements

• Improve log messages related to startup permissions errors.

Notes

A new version of the agent has been released. Follow standard procedures to update your Infrastructure agent.

Bug fixes

• When the configuration variable startup_connection_retries is set to -1, the Agent will keep checking forever the connectivity at startup to avoid CrashLoopBackOff states in K8S in case of failures. 'startup_connection_retry_time' has been removed and now the Agent uses an exponential backoff algorithm.
• Improve the exponential backoff algorithm the Agent uses when posting metrics fails due to a non 2xx request response.
• Filter duplicated device entries in the StorageSample.