New Relic PHP Agent Release Notes

End of Life Notices

• The New Relic PHP agent no longer supports PHP 5.2. New Relic highly encourages upgrading to a supported version of PHP - 5.6 or higher. If you would like to continue running the New Relic PHP agent with PHP 5.2, we recommend using version 6.9 of the agent, however please note that we can only offer limited support in this case.

New Features

• Automatic transaction naming for Magento 2 has been improved. Previously, only requests that were handled by Magento's normal routing were automatically named, which resulted in request types that utilized Magento's interceptor/plugin functionality being named as unknown. This primarily affected users of the REST or SOAP web services.

  REST and SOAP requests will now be named in the Webapi/Rest and Webapi/Soap namespaces, respectively, and will be named according to the service class and method that handle the request.

  Third party modules that add an interceptor on Magento\Framework\App\FrontControllerInterface to override the dispatch() method will result in transaction names that are based on the interceptor class name. New Relic recommends using the newrelic_name_transaction() API function from within the module to name the transaction if you require more precision.

End of Life Notices

• Support for PHP 5.2 in the New Relic PHP agent is deprecated and will be removed in a future version. New Relic highly encourages upgrading to a supported version of PHP - 5.6 or higher. If you would like to continue running the New Relic PHP agent with PHP 5.2, we recommend using version 6.9 of the agent, however please note that we can only offer limited support in this case.

New Features

• Instance information for the pgsql and PDO pgsql extensions is now captured. Slow database queries and transaction traces now include the name of the host (including the port or socket) and database that the query was run against.

  Collection of host information can be disabled by setting newrelic.datastore_tracer.instance_reporting.enabled = false in the newrelic.ini. Similarly, the database name can be omitted with newrelic.datastore_tracer.database_name_reporting.enabled = false.

End of Life Notices

• Support for PHP 5.2 in the New Relic PHP agent is deprecated and will be removed in a future version. New Relic highly encourages upgrading to a supported version of PHP - 5.6 or higher. If you would like to continue running the New Relic PHP agent with PHP 5.2, we recommend using version 6.8 of the agent, however please note that we can only offer limited support in this case.

New Features

• Support for PHP 7.1 has been added.

• The elapsed time after which an application will be considered inactive can now be configured using the newrelic.daemon.app_timeout setting. This setting is useful when the only transactions being executed are very infrequent, such background processing using a cron job. Previously, an application was considering inactive after ten minutes with no transactions.

• Instance information for the mysql, mysqli, and PDO mysql extensions is now captured. Slow database queries and transaction traces now include the name of the host (including the port or socket) and database that the query was run against.

  Collection of host information can be disabled by setting newrelic.datastore_tracer.instance_reporting.enabled = false in the newrelic.ini. Similarly, the database name can be omitted with newrelic.datastore_tracer.database_name_reporting.enabled = false.

Bug Fixes

• Automatic transaction naming for MediaWiki versions 1.18 and later was broken in version 6.3 of the New Relic PHP agent. This has been fixed.

New Features

• PHPUnit test events

  Support has been added for the popular unit test library PHPUnit (versions 3.7 to 5.5, inclusive). When enabled, the agent reports test results as custom Insights events. Test suite summary data are sent as TestSuite events, while individual test cases are sent as Test events.

  You can enable this feature in your newrelic.ini file with newrelic.phpunit_events.enabled = true. Depending on your events retention policy, enabling this setting may impact your New Relic billing statement.

  Read more about this feature on our documentation site.

• Support has been added for Slim Framework 2.x and 3.x.

Upgrade Notices

• To avoid potential deadlocks, MySQL SELECT queries that use the FOR UPDATE or LOCK IN SHARE MODE suffixes will no longer generate explain plans.

Bug Fixes

• Automatic page load timing instrumentation was broken on PHP 5.4-7.0 in certain edge cases: most notably, when the <head> element was not in the first 40kB of the page content, or when the </body> element was not in the last few kilobytes of content. This has been fixed.
• Prevent real user monitoring JavaScript injection when the Content-Type is first set to text/html then subsequently changed to something else (for example, application/json). This was a regression introduced in version 6.2.

Bug Fixes

• When using version 6.6.0 of the PHP agent, instantiating a PDO object with options set could result in PHP crashing at the end of handling a request. This has been fixed.

New Features

• Support has been added for Laravel 5.3.

• Experimental Laravel Queue support.

  Experimental support for the Laravel Queue component has been added. This supports all versions of Laravel from 4.0 to 5.3, inclusive.

  Whether run via artisan queue:listen or artisan queue:work, queue workers will now generate a separate background transaction for each job that is processed. These transactions will be named with the class name of the job, or IlluminateQueueClosure if a closure was queued.

  Additionally, a transaction that queues one or more jobs will be linked to the background transaction(s) that processed those jobs on the transaction map in the New Relic UI.

  To enable this support, you will need to set the laravel_queue feature flag in newrelic.ini. For most users, this will simply involve adding this line:

  newrelic.feature_flag=laravel_queue

  As this is presently an experimental feature, we would welcome feedback — both positive and negative — on whether this feature helps users using the Laravel Queue component better visualise the structure and performance of their applications.

  If all goes well, it is anticipated that Laravel Queue support will be enabled by default in a future version of the agent.

Upgrade Notices

• Symfony 1 transactions that generate 404 errors due to no routes being matched will now be named based on the module and action that are actually used, rather than the module and action inferred from the request URL. In most cases, this will result in the transaction name being based on the error_404_module and error_404_action Symfony settings.

  Note that, as a result of this change, if the configured 404 action calls sfAction::forward() to forward to another action, the transaction name will be based on the final action. All other uses of sfAction::forward() are unaffected.

Bug Fixes

• Previously, calling PDO::query with more than one argument resulted in the query being counted under the 'other' category on the Datastores page in the New Relic UI. This has been fixed. The agent will now correctly categorize the query as 'select', 'insert', 'update', or 'delete'.
• Previously, calling PDO::query with more than one argument resulted in the agent reporting "(unknown sql)" if the query was slow. (i.e., it exceeded the threshold given by the newrelic.transaction_tracer.explain_threshold setting.) This has been fixed.
• Previously, calling SQLite3::querySingle with two arguments resulted in the query being counted under the 'other' category on the Datastores page in the New Relic UI. This has been fixed. The agent will now correctly categorize the query as 'select', 'insert', 'update', or 'delete'.
• Previously, calling SQLite3::querySingle with two arguments resulted in the agent reporting "(unknown sql)" if the query was slow. (i.e. It exceeded the threshold given by the newrelic.transaction_tracer.explain_threshold setting.) This has been fixed.
• Transient Magento 2 tables now have the unique numbers removed from their names to avoid metric grouping issues.
• Pressflow 6 applications were incorrectly detected as Drupal 7 applications. This could cause POST requests made using drupal_http_request to be converted into GET requests. This has been fixed.
• Explain plan generation is now always performed on a separate database connection. This has been changed to avoid issues when using MySQL's SELECT FOUND_ROWS() feature.
• Previously, instrumenting method calls that resolved to __call() or __callStatic() calls could result in crashes on PHP 7. This primarily manifested in crashes for users of certain WordPress plugins (for example, wp-external-links) that registered hooks or actions that used magic methods. This has been fixed.

New Features

• Support has been added for Zend Framework 3.

Bug Fixes

• The behavior of the installer when attempting to detect PHP installations has been tightened up. Previously, a directory structure such as /usr/local/php/php/* would be detected as an installation of PHP in /usr/local/php, as the nested php directory would be wrongly assumed to be a PHP CLI binary. The installer now checks if the nested php (or php-config) is a directory, and ignores the path if so.

  Although this is likely to improve the installer in multiple environments, most noticeably, this fix removes erroneous messages about there being multiple PHP installations when installing the PHP agent within the Docker Hub's official PHP images.

• Spurious messages like ALERT: oops, unknown child could appear in the PHP FPM log when a New Relic daemon process was started. This has been fixed.

New Features

• Ignore Errors

  A new newrelic.error_collector.ignore_errors setting has been added. When configured, this setting can be used to prevent errors, such as E_WARNING, from being reported to New Relic. This setting does not affect errors reported via the newrelic_notice_error API.

• Ignore Exceptions

  A new newrelic.error_collector.ignore_exceptions setting has been added. This setting accepts a comma-separated list of fully-qualified class names. When an uncaught exception occurs, the agent will not report the exception to New Relic if it is an instance of a class in this list. This setting does not affect errors reported via the newrelic_notice_error API.

Upgrade Notices

• Guzzle support is now enabled by default. It can be disabled by setting the new newrelic.guzzle.enabled setting to false.

  The guzzle feature flag that was previously used to enable Guzzle support is now ignored.

Bug Fixes

• The first request in each PHP process would remove any output handlers installed using the output_handler configuration setting for users of PHP 5.4 and later. This has been fixed: existing output handlers will now remain untouched.
• Transient WordPress hooks now have the unique numbers removed from their names to avoid metric grouping issues.
• In cases where WordPress' WP_CONTENT_DIR directory was set to a custom value, WordPress plugin metrics were not reported on PHP 5.2 to 5.4, inclusive. This affected users of the popular WP-Skeleton project. This has been fixed.
• A regression in version 6.3 could cause Guzzle 6 users to lose support for cross application tracing and service maps, in particular when Guzzle 6 was autoloaded as a result of instantiating the only GuzzleHttp\Client object used within the lifetime of the script. This has been fixed.

New Features

• Support for Postgres prepared statements has been added when the pg_prepare and pg_execute functions are used. The agent will now report Datastore metrics as well as capture slow queries.

Bug Fixes

• Added a workaround for a stack corruption bug in very old versions of the Suhosin extension when used with PHP 5.3 or higher. The bug exists in Suhosin 0.9.29 and older versions only. Newer versions are not affected.
• Automatic transaction naming could fail in certain circumstances on Laravel 4.1 or higher on PHP 5 when a before route filter was installed. This has been fixed.
• Automatic transaction naming could fail on Laravel 5.x when a global middleware handled the request without forwarding it deeper into the application. For example, the default Authenticate middleware returns a 401 Forbidden response to unauthenticated requests, preventing proper transaction naming. This has been fixed.
• A segfault could occur in memory constrained environments, particularly on PHP 7. This has been fixed.