Ruby agent release notesRSS

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.

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.

v4.2.0

• Sinatra 2.0 and Padrino 0.14.x Support

  The agent has been verified against the latest versions of Sinatra and Padrino.

• Rails 5.1 Support

  The Ruby agent has been validated against the latest release of Ruby on Rails!

• APP_ENV considered when determining environment

  The agent will now consider the APP_ENV environment when starting up.

• Test files excluded from gem

  The gemspec has been updated to exclude test files from being packaged into the gem. Thanks dimko for the contribution!

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.

v4.0.0

• Require Ruby 2.0.0+

  The agent no longer supports Ruby versions prior to 2.0, JRuby 1.7 and earlier, and all versions of Rubinius. Customers using affected Rubies can continue to run 3.x agent versions, but new features or bugfixes will not be published for 3.x agents. For more information, check out our community forum.

• OkJson vendored library removed

  Ruby 1.8 did not include the JSON gem by default, so the agent included a vendored version of OkJson that it would fall back on using in cases where the JSON gem was not available. This has been removed.

• YAJL workaround removed

  yajl-ruby versions prior to 1.2 had the potential to cause a segmentation fault when working large, deeply-nested objects like thread profiles. If you are using yajl-ruby with the JSON monkey patches enabled by requiring yajl/json_gem, you should upgrade to at least version 1.2.

• Deprecated APIs removed

  • Agent.abort_transaction!
  • Agent.add_custom_parameters
  • Agent.add_request_parameters
  • Agent.browser_timing_footer
  • Agent.get_stats
  • Agent.get_stats_no_scope
  • Agent.record_transaction
  • Agent.reset_stats
  • Agent.set_user_attributes
  • Agent::Instrumentation::Rack
  • ActionController#newrelic_notice_error
  • ActiveRecordHelper.rollup_metrics_for (may be incompatible with newrelic_moped)
  • Instrumentation::MetricFrame.recording_web_transaction?
  • Instrumentation::MetricFrame.abort_transaction!
  • MethodTracer.get_stats_scoped
  • MethodTracer.get_stats_unscoped
  • MethodTracer.trace_method_execution
  • MethodTracer.trace_method_execution_no_scope
  • MethodTracer.trace_method_execution_with_scope
  • MetricSpec#sub
  • MetricStats#get_stats
  • MetricStats#get_stats_no_scope
  • NoticedError#exception_class
  • Rack::ErrorCollector
  • StatsEngine::Samplers.add_sampler
  • StatsEngine::Samplers.add_harvest_sampler

  The above methods have had deprecation notices on them for some time and have now been removed. Assistance migrating usage of these APIs is available at https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/agents/ruby-agent/troubleshooting/update-... .

  The agent no longer deletes deprecated keys passed to add_method_tracer. Passing in deprecated keys can cause an exception. Ensure that you are not passing any of the following keys: :force, :scoped_metric_only, :deduct_call_time_from_parent to add_method_tracer.

  The agent no longer deletes deprecated keys passed in as options to NewRelic::Agent.notice_error. If you are passing any of these deprecated keys: :request_params, :request, :referer to the notice_error API, please delete them otherwise they will be collected as custom attributes.

• Error handling changes

  The agent now only checks for original_exception in environments with Rails versions prior to 5. Checking for Exception#cause has been removed. In addition, the agent now will match class name with message and backtrace when noticing errors that have an original_exception.