Java agent release notesRSS

Fixes

Fixes an issue in 6.4.0 where spans would not get sent to Infinite Tracing.

Note:

• There is an issue with this agent release that could lead to spans not being sent to Infinite Tracing. Please use 6.4.1 instead.

New Features and Improvements:

• Spring Webflux/Netty Reactor instrumentation improvements for enhanced tracing across asynchronous thread hops.
• The agent will now utilize a backoff sequence on connection retries to Infinite Tracing.
• New distributed tracing APIs have been added to better support general use cases for propagating distributed tracing headers. In particular the new APIs provide enhanced support for W3C Trace Context but are flexible enough to support other header protocols that may be supported by the agent in the future. Previous distributed tracing APIs have been deprecated and are subject to removal in a future agent release. See documentation here.
  • Transaction.insertDistributedTraceHeaders(Headers) is used to create and insert distributed tracing headers (both newrelic and W3C Trace Context) into a Headers data structure.
  • Transaction.acceptDistributedTraceHeaders(TransportType, Headers) is used to accept the distributed tracing headers sent from the calling service and link these services together in a distributed trace.

Fixes:

• Updated the Java agent’s snakeyaml dependency to 1.27.
• In some environments the jar collector service could lead to high CPU utilization at application startup. The agent now provides a configurable rate limiter, with a reasonable default, for processing jars detected in the application’s environment. See documentation here.

Support statement:

• New Relic recommends that you upgrade the agent regularly to ensure that you're getting the latest features and performance benefits. Additionally, older releases will no longer be supported when they reach end-of-life.

Improvements

• Spring Webflux
  • The Java agent now supports Spring Webflux versions 5.3+
  • Added reactor-netty.errors.enabled configuration to allow disabling error reporting in Subscriber::onError.
• Scala 2.13
  • The Java agent now provides support for Scala 2.13 and frameworks compiled with 2.13 Akka-http, Play

Fixes

• The netty-4.0.8 instrumentation would sometimes not start a Transaction on channelRead, potentially affecting instrumentation dependent on it including: Spring, Akka and Play
• Updated the Java agent’s Apache HttpClient dependency to 5.13
• Spring Webclient could report the wrong URL when multiple HTTP calls to several URLs occurred in parallel

Fixes

• Fixes an issue where Spring-Webflux applications with endpoints returning Flux or empty content could become unresponsive

New features

• Adds support for Akka Http Core 10.2.0. Thank you jobicarter for reporting this issue.
• Adds support for gRPC 1.30.0. Thank you jef for submitting this request and trying it out.
• Adds support for map and flatmap async external calls in spring webflux framework. Previously the agent didn’t support client calls that occurred within the map or flatmap methods within the spring webflux framework. External calls such as serviceB and serviceC in the example below would not get reported to New Relic:

return serviceA.getData()
                .map(service -> Response.builder().service(service).build())
                .flatMap(serviceB::getData)
                .flatMap(serviceC::getData)
                .doOnNext(this::saveResponse);

• Adds support for Play 2.16.3. Many thanks to junder31 for this contribution.

Improvements

• The agent now supports parsing cgroup ids that do not contain docker-. Previously, the agent only supported docker cgroup ids that contained docker- in them, such as 1:cpu:/system.slice/docker-12345abcde.scope. The agent now supports parsing cgroup ids such as 1:cpu:/system.slice/crio-12345abcde.scope.

Fixes

• Prevents the agent from logging a timeout exception when using New Relic Edge with Infinite Tracing but the agent hasn’t sent spans in a while.
• Prevents the agent from logging a socket exception when trying to retrieve cloud provider information in a non-cloud environment.
• Adds New Relic EU certifications if ca_bundle_path is specified. This fix also came with the reintroduction of the use_private_ssl config, which can be set to add our agent certs to the truststore.

Support statement:

• New Relic recommends that you upgrade the agent regularly to ensure that you're getting the latest features and performance benefits. Additionally, older releases will no longer be supported when they reach end-of-life.

Improvements

Java 15

• The New Relic Java agent is now fully compatible with version 15 of the OpenJDK and Hotspot JDKs.

APIs

• New Segment.addCustomAttribute(...) APIs have been added for adding attributes directly to spans.
• Newrelic.addCustomParameter API now supports boolean values

Fixes

• The agent would try to read environment variables using system-property syntax. It will now log the correct syntax and ignore the incorrect value.

Notes

• The Java agent now includes the newrelic.com SSL certificate. In previous agent versions, applications using a custom Truststore would have to provide their certificate or use the use_private_ssl configuration which was removed in 6.0.0.
• Fixed an issue where applications could fail to start due to the agent attempting to access the JMX MBean server before it was initialized.

Improvements

• Register an MBean to expose the agent linking metadata.
• Support for okhttp 4.4 instrumentation.
• Improve reconnect behavior by not pinning to preconnected collector host instance.

Fixes

• Fix for asynchronous jar file collection. Collection of modules will no longer block the initial first harvest.
• Fix for Real Time Streaming. The first Real Time Streaming harvest will no longer be delayed by 30 seconds.
• Fix for reactor-netty verifier versions
• Fix race condition around connection pool exhaustion by separating pool timeout from connection timeout.

Note re: certificate bundle use_private_ssl

This release removed the certificate bundle from the agent artifact. Users previously using use_private_ssl should now use the ca_bundle_path configuration directive. For more information, see the Java v6.0.0 release on GitHub.

Improvements

• Agent Extensions The Java agent now provides a configuration to disable reloading extensions during runtime. extensions: reload_modified: false

• Spring Webflux The Java agent now provides updated instrumentation for reactor-netty-0.8.0+ to link the Transaction across threads. In previous agent versions, Transactions would be named /NettyDispatcher.

• Logging format To make the agent log easier to sort and read across locales, the date/time format has changed. The new format is log4j's ISO8610_OFFSET_DATE_TIME_HHMM and it is rendered like this in all locales:

  2020-07-10T08:33:00,328-0700 [9550 1] com.newrelic INFO: New Relic Agent: Loading configuration file "lib/./newrelic.yml"

  2020-07-10T08:33:00,423-0700 [9550 1] com.newrelic INFO: Using default collector host: collector.newrelic.com

  All other data on the log line remains the same.

Fixes

• Solr instrumentation could throw a NullPointerException when Query.toString() returned null.

Improvements

• Distributed tracing: With distributed tracing spans and/or Infinite Tracing, the Java agent will now incorporate additional information from the transaction event on to the root span event of the transaction.

• New TracedMethod.addCustomAttribute(...) APIs have been added for adding attributes directly to spans.

  Note: Any attribute include or exclude settings specific to transaction events should be applied to your span attributes configuration or your global attributes configuration.

• The Java agent now uses AWS's IMDS v2 to gather instance information.

Fixes

• Jetty JMX metrics would not report when running embedded in Spring Boot.
• Local configuration settings could revert to the default following an agent reconnect.