CHANGELOG.md

New Relic Ruby Agent Release Notes

v9.16.0

Version 9.16.0 introduces the following features and bug fixes:

• Feature: Instrumentation for aws-sdk-lambda

  When the aws-sdk-lambda gem is available and used to invoke remote AWS Lambda functions, the timing and error details of the invocations will be reported to New Relic. PR#2926.

• Feature: Add new configuration options to attach custom tags (labels) to logs

  The Ruby agent now allows you to opt-in to adding your custom tags (labels) to agent-forwarded logs. With custom tags on logs, platform engineers can easily filter, search, and correlate log data for faster and more efficient troubleshooting, improved performance, and optimized resource utilization. PR#2925

• Feature: Update View Component instrumentation+

  The .identifier method will be formally exposed as part of the View Component public API. The agent will now use this method for building metric names when available, ensuring ongoing compatibility with all View Component versions. PR#2956

• Bugfix: Record explain plan traces on Rails 7.2+

  Rails 7.2 removed adapter-specific connection methods (ex. ActiveRecord::Base.postgresql_connection) and replaced them with ActiveRecord::Base.with_connection. Our explain plan feature relies on making a connection to the database to create an explain plan trace. Due to a bug in our tests, we missed this regression. Now, the agent uses the new method to fetch explain plans on Rails 7.2+. Thank you, @gsar and @gstark for bringing this to our attention! Issue#2922 PR#2940

v9.15.0

Version 9.15.0 updates View Component instrumentation to use a default metric name when one is unavailable, adds a configuration option to associate the AWS account ID with the DynamoDB calls from the AWS SDK, resolves a bug in rdkafka instrumentation when using the karafka-rdkafka gem, resolves a bug in the ruby-kafka instrumentation, fixes a bug with Grape instrumentation, and addresses a bug preventing the agent from running in serverless mode in an AWS Lambda layer.

• Feature: New configuration option cloud.aws.account_id

  A new configuration option has been added, cloud.aws.account_id, that will allow New Relic to provide more details about certain calls made using the AWS SDK. For example, relationships between AWS services instrumented with New Relic's CloudWatch Metric Streams will have relationships formed in the service map with APM applications. Currently, the DynamoDB instrumentation is the only instrumentation that will make use of this configuration option, but this will be used in future instrumentation as well. PR#2904

• Feature: Use default View/component metric name for unidentified View Components

  Previously, when a View Component metric name could not be identified, the agent would set the name as nil. Now, the agent defaults to using View/component as the metric name when one can not be identified. PR#2907

• Bugfix: Instrumentation errors when using the karafka-rdkafka gem

  Due to version differences between the rdkafka gem and karafka-rdkafka gem, the agent could encounter an error when it tried to install rdkafka instrumentation. This has now been resolved. Thank you to @krisdigital for bringing this issue to our attention. PR#2880

• Bugfix: Stop calling deprecated all_specs method to check for the presence of newrelic-grape

  In 9.14.0, we released a fix for calls to the deprecated Bundler.rubygems.all_specs, but the fix fell short for the agent's Grape instrumentation and deprecation warnings could still be raised. The condition has been simplified and deprecation warnings should no longer be raised. Thank you, @excelsior for bringing this to our attention. Issue#2885 PR#2906

• Bugfix: Instrumentation errors when using the ruby-kafka gem

  Kafka::Consumer#each_message takes keyword arguments, while the prepended method is defined with a single splat positional argument. In Ruby >= 3.0, this signature mismatch raises an ArgumentError. Thank you @patrickarnett for providing this bugfix. PR#2915

• Bugfix: Restore AWS Lambda layer operational functionality

  Version 9.14.0 of the agent introduced an optimization related to how the agent handles boolean configuration parameters which inadvertently caused the agent to stop operating properly in an AWS Lambda layer context. Issue#2919PR#2920

v9.14.0

Version 9.14.0 adds Apache Kafka instrumentation for the rdkafka and ruby-kafka gems, introduces a configuration-based, automatic way to add custom instrumentation method tracers, correctly captures MIME type for ActionDispatch 7.0+ requests, properly handles Boolean coercion for newrelic.yml configuration, fixes a JRuby bug in the configuration manager, fixes a bug related to Bundler.rubygems.installed_specs, and fixes a bug to make the agent compatible with ViewComponent v3.15.0+.

• Feature: Add Apache Kafka instrumentation for the rdkafka and ruby-kafka gems

  The agent now has instrumentation for both the rdkafka and ruby-kafka gems. The agent will record transactions and message broker segments for produce and consume calls made using these gems. PR#2824 PR#2842

• Feature: Add a configuration option to permit custom method tracers to be defined automatically

  A new :automatic_custom_instrumentation_method_list configuration parameter has been added to permit the user to define a list of fully qualified (namespaced) Ruby methods for the agent to automatically add custom instrumentation for without requiring any code modifications to be made to the classes that define the methods.

  The list should be an array of CLASS#METHOD (for instance methods) and/or CLASS.METHOD (for class methods) strings.

  Use fully qualified class names (using the :: delimiter) that include any module or class namespacing.

  Here is some Ruby source code that defines a render_png instance method for an Image class and a notify class method for a User class, both within a MyCompany module namespace:

  module MyCompany
    class Image
      def render_png
        # code to render a PNG
      end
    end
  
    class User
      def self.notify
        # code to notify users
      end
    end
  end
  

  Given that source code, the newrelic.yml config file might request instrumentation for both of these methods like so:

  automatic_custom_instrumentation_method_list:
    - MyCompany::Image#render_png
    - MyCompany::User.notify
  

  That configuration example uses YAML array syntax to specify both methods. Alternatively, you can use a comma-delimited string:

  automatic_custom_instrumentation_method_list: 'MyCompany::Image#render_png, MyCompany::User.notify'
  

  Whitespace around the comma(s) in the list is optional. When configuring the agent with a list of methods via the NEW_RELIC_AUTOMATIC_CUSTOM_INSTRUMENTATION_METHOD_LIST environment variable, use this comma-delimited string format:

  export NEW_RELIC_AUTOMATIC_CUSTOM_INSTRUMENTATION_METHOD_LIST='MyCompany::Image#render_png, MyCompany::User.notify'
  

  PR#2851

• Feature: Collect just MIME type for ActionDispatch 7.0+ requests

  Rails 7.0 introduced changes to the behavior of ActionDispatch::Request#content_type, adding extra request-related details the agent wasn't expecting to collect. Additionally, the agent's use of content_type was triggering deprecation warnings. The agent now uses ActionDispatch::Request#media_type to capture the MIME type. Thanks to @internethostage for letting us know about this change. Issue#2500 PR#2855

• Bugfix: Corrected Boolean coercion for newrelic.yml configuration

  Previously, any String assigned to New Relic configurations expecting a Boolean value were evaluated as true. This could lead to unexpected behavior. For example, setting application_logging.enabled: 'false' in newrelic.yml would incorrectly evaluate to application_logging.enabled: true due to the truthy nature of Strings.

  Now, the agent strictly interprets Boolean configuration values. It recognizes both actual Boolean values and certain Strings/Symbols:

  • 'true', 'yes', or 'on' (evaluates to true)
  • 'false', 'no', or 'off' (evaluates to false)

  Any other inputs will revert to the setting's default configuration value. PR#2847

• Bugfix: JRuby not saving configuration values correctly in configuration manager

  Previously, a change made to fix a different JRuby bug caused the agent to not save configuration values correctly in the configuration manager when running on JRuby. This has been fixed. PR#2848

• Bugfix: Update condition to verify Bundler.rubygems.installed_specs is available

  To address a recent Bundler deprecation warning, we started using Bundler.rubygems.installed_specs instead of Bundler.rubygems.all_specs in environments that seemed appropriate. We discovered the version constraint we used was too low. Now, rather than check the version, we check for the method using respond_to?. PR#2853

• Bugfix: Support view_component v3.15.0+

  Previously the agent had been making use of a private API to obtain a component identifier value. This private API was dropped in v3.15.0 of view_component, resulting in errors from the New Relic Ruby agent's continued attempts to use it. Many thanks to community member @navidemad for bringing this issue to our attention and supplying a bugfix with PR#2870.

v9.13.0

Version 9.13.0 enhances support for AWS Lambda functions, adds experimental OpenSearch instrumentation, updates framework detection, silences a Bundler deprecation warning, fixes Falcon dispatcher detection, fixes a bug with Redis instrumentation installation, and addresses a JRuby-specific concurrency issue.

• Feature: Enhance AWS Lambda function instrumentation

When utilized via the latest New Relic Ruby layer for AWS Lambda, the agent now offers enhanced support for AWS Lambda function instrumentation.

• The agent's instrumentation for AWS Lambda functions now supports distributed tracing.
• Web-triggered invocations are now identified as being "web"-based when an API Gateway call is involved, with support for both API Gateway versions 1.0 and 2.0.
• Web-based calls have the HTTP method, URI, and status code recorded.
• The agent now recognizes and reports on 12 separate AWS resources that are capable of triggering a Lambda function invocation: ALB, API Gateway V1, API Gateway V2, CloudFront, CloudWatch Scheduler, DynamoStreams, Firehose, Kinesis, S3, SES, SNS, and SQS.
• The type of the triggering resource and its ARN will be recorded for each resource, and for many of them, extra resource-specific attributes will be recorded as well. For example, Lambda function invocations triggered by S3 bucket activity will now result in the S3 bucket name being recorded. PR#2811

• Feature: Add experimental OpenSearch instrumentation

  The agent will now automatically instrument the opensearch-ruby gem. We're marking this instrumentation as experimental because more work is needed to fully test it. OpenSearch instrumentation provides telemetry similar to Elasticsearch. Thank you, @Earlopain for reporting the issue and @praveen-ks for an initial draft of the instrumentation. Issue#2228 PR#2796

• Feature: Improve framework detection accuracy for Grape and Padrino

  Previously, applications using the Grape framework would set ruby as their framework within the Environment Report. Now, Grape applications will be set to grape. Similarly, applications using the Padrino framework would be set to sinatra. Now, they will be set to padrino. This will help the New Relic security agent compatibility checks. Thank you, @prateeksen for making this change. Issue#2777 PR#2789

• Feature: Silence Bundler all_specs deprecation warning

  Bundler.rubygems.all_specs was deprecated in favor of Bundler.rubygems.installed_specs in Bundler versions 2+, causing the agent to emit deprecation warnings. The method has been updated when Bundler 2+ is detected and warnings are now silenced. Thanks to @jcoyne for reporting this issue. Issue#2733 PR#2823

• Bugfix: Fix Falcon dispatcher detection

  Previously, we tried to use the object space to determine whether the Falcon web server was in use. However, Falcon is not added to the object space until after the environment report is generated, resulting in a nil dispatcher. Now, we revert to an earlier strategy that discovered the dispatcher using File.basename. Thank you, @prateeksen for reporting this issue and researching the problem. Issue#2778 PR#2795

• Bugfix: Fix for a Redis instrumentation error when Redis::Cluster::Client is present

  The Redis instrumentation previously contained a bug that would cause it to error out when Redis::Cluster::Client was present, owing to the use of a Ruby return outside of a method. Thanks very much to @jdelStrother for not only reporting this bug but pointing us to the root cause as well. Issue#2814 PR#2816

• Bugfix: Address JRuby concurrency issue with config hash accessing

  The agent's internal configuration class maintains a hash that occassionally gets rebuilt. During the rebuild, certain previously dynamically determined instrumentation values are preserved for the benefit of the New Relic Ruby security agent. After reports from JRuby customers regarding concurrency issues related to the hash being accessed while being modified, two separate fixes went into the hash rebuild logic previously: a Hash#dup operation and a synchronize do block. But errors were still reported. We ourselves remain unable to reproduce these concurrency errors despite using the same exact versions of JRuby and all reported software. After confirming that the hash access code in question is only needed for the Ruby security agent (which operates only in non-production dedicated security testing environments), we have introduced a new fix for JRuby customers that will simply skip over the troublesome code when JRuby is in play but the security agent is not. PR#2798

v9.12.0

Version 9.12.0 adds support for the newrelic_security agent, introduces instrumentation for the LogStasher gem, improves instrumentation for the redis-clustering gem, and updates the Elasticsearch instrumentation to only attempt to get the cluster name once per client, even if it fails.

• Feature: Add support for the newrelic_security agent

  New Relic Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST) can help you prevent cyberattacks and breaches on your applications by probing your running code for exploitable vulnerabilities.

  The newrelic_security gem provides this feature for Ruby. It depends on newrelic_rpm. This is the first version of newrelic_rpm compatible with newrelic_security.

  At this time, the security agent is intended for use only within a dedicated security testing environment with data that can tolerate modification or deletion. The security agent is available as a separate Ruby gem, newrelic_security. It is recommended that this separate gem only be introduced to a security testing environment by leveraging Bundler grouping like so:

    # Gemfile
    gem 'newrelic_rpm'               # New Relic APM observability agent
    gem 'newrelic-infinite_tracing'  # New Relic Infinite Tracing
  
    group :security do
      gem 'newrelic_security', require: false        # New Relic security agent
    end

  In order to run the security agent, you need to update your configuration. At a minimum, security.agent.enabled and security.enabled must be set to true. They are false by default. Similar to the gem installation, we recommend you set these configurations for a special security testing environment only.

  Here's an example using newrelic.yml:

    common: &default_settings
      license_key: <%= ENV['NEW_RELIC_LICENSE_KEY'] %>
      app_name: "Example app"
  
    development:
      <<: *default_settings
      app_name: <%= app_name %> (Development)
  
    security:
      <<: *default_settings
      security.enabled: true
      security.agent.enabled: true
  
    production:
      <<: *default_settings

  The following configuration relate to the newrelic_security gem:

  Configuration name	Default	Behavior
  security.agent.enabled	false	If true, the security agent is loaded (a Ruby 'require' is performed)
  security.enabled	false	If true, the security agent is started (the agent runs in its event loop)
  security.mode	'IAST'	Defines the mode for the security agent to operate in. Currently only 'IAST' is supported
  security.validator_service_url	'wss://csec.nr-data.net'	Defines the endpoint URL for posting security related data
  security.detection.rci.enabled	true	If true, enables RCI (remote code injection) detection
  security.detection.rxss.enabled	true	If true, enables RXSS (reflected cross-site scripting) detection
  security.detection.deserialization.enabled	true	If true, enables deserialization detection
  security.application_info.port	nil	An Integer representing the port the application is listening on. This setting is mandatory for Passenger servers. Other servers should be detected by default.

• Feature: Add instrumentation for LogStasher

  The agent will now record logs generated by LogStasher. Versions 1.0.0 and above of the LogStasher gem are supported. PR#2559

• Feature: Add instrumentation for redis-clustering

  Version 5.x of the redis gem moved cluster behavior into a different gem, redis-clustering. This gem can access instrumentation registered through RedisClient::Middleware. Previously, the agent only instrumented the call_pipelined method through this approach, but now users of the redis-clustering gem will also have instrumentation registered for connect and call methods. In addition, the way the database_name attribute is set for Redis datastore spans is now compatible with all versions of Redis supported by the New Relic Ruby agent. Thank you, @praveen-ks for bringing this to our attention. Issue#2444 PR#2720

• Bugfix: Update Elasticsearch instrumentation to only attempt to get the cluster name once per client

  Previously, the agent would attempt to get the cluster name every time a call was made if it was not already captured. This could lead to a large number of failures if the cluster name could not be retrieved. Now, the agent will only attempt to get the cluster name once per client, even if it fails. Thank you, @ascoppa for bringing this to our attention. Issue#2730 PR#2743

• Feature: Produce metrics for 4 additional Action Controller Rails notifications

  Four additional Action Controller related Rails notifications are now subscribed to by the agent to produce telemetry. These 4 are exist_fragment?, expire_fragment, read_fragment, and write_fragment. As with instrumentation for Action Controller itself, these notifications are enabled by default and can be disabled by setting :disable_action_controller to true in the agent's newrelic.yml configuration file. PR#2745

v9.11.0

Version 9.11.0 introduces instrumentation for the aws-sdk-sqs gem, fixes a bug related to expected errors not bearing a "true" value for the "expected" attribute if expected as a result of an HTTP status code match and changes the way Stripe instrumentation metrics are named to prevent high-cardinality issues.

• Feature: Add instrumentation for SQS

  The agent has added instrumentation for the aws-sdk-sqs gem. The agent will now record message broker spans for SQS client calls made with the aws-sdk-sqs gem. PR#2679

• Bugfix: HTTP status code based expected errors will now have an "expected" value of "true"

  Previously when an error was treated as expected by the agent as a result of a matching HTTP status code being found in the :'error_collector.expected_status_codes' configuration setting, the error would not appear with an "expected" attribute value of "true" in the errors in the errors inbox. PR#2710

• Bugfix: Stripe metric names will no longer include full request paths to limit the unique name count

  The Stripe instrumentation introduced in agent version v9.5.0 produced instrumentation metric names that used the full Stripe request path. For any significant Stripe usage, this could quickly lead to very large number of distinct metric names. Now only the API version and the category part of the request path are included in the metric name which still includes the "Stripe" opener and method (ex: "get") closer. Thanks to @jdelStrother and @jsneedles for bringing this issue to our attention and providing terrific information explaining the problem and potential paths to resolution. PR#2716

v9.10.2

Version 9.10.2 fixes a bug related to the new DynamoDB instrumentation and removes Rails::Command::RakeCommand from the default list of denylisted constants.

• Bugfix: DynamoDB instrumentation logging errors when trying to get account_id

  When trying to access data needed to add the account_id to the DynamoDB span, the agent encountered an error when certain credentials classes were used. This has been fixed. Thanks to @kichik for bringing this to our attention. PR#2684

• Bugfix: Remove Rails::Command::RakeCommand from the default list of autostart.denylisted_constants

  The default value for the autostart.denylisted_constants configuration was changed in 9.10.0 to include Rails::Command::RunnerCommand and Rails::Command::RakeCommand. The inclusion of Rails::Command::RakeCommand prevented the agent from starting automatically when Solid Queue was started using bin/rails solid_queue:start. We recognize there are many commands nested within Rails::Command::RakeCommand and have decided to remove it from the default list. We encourage users who do not want the agent to run on Rails::Command::RakeCommand to add the constant to their configuration. This can be accomplished by adding the following to your newrelic.yml file:

    autostart.denylisted_constants: "Rails::Command::ConsoleCommand,Rails::Command::CredentialsCommand,Rails::Command::Db::System::ChangeCommand,Rails::Command::DbConsoleCommand,Rails::Command::DestroyCommand,Rails::Command::DevCommand,Rails::Command::EncryptedCommand,Rails::Command::GenerateCommand,Rails::Command::InitializersCommand,Rails::Command::NotesCommand,Rails::Command::RakeCommand,Rails::Command::RoutesCommand,Rails::Command::RunnerCommand,Rails::Command::SecretsCommand,Rails::Console,Rails::DBConsole"

  Thank you, @edariedl, for reporting this issue. Issue#2677 PR#2694

v9.10.1

• Bugfix: Incompatibility with Bootstrap

Version 9.10.1 fixes an incompatibility between the agent and the Bootstrap gem caused by agent v9.10.0's introduction of a lib/bootstrap.rb file. Thank you to @dorner for reporting the bug and identifying the 'bootstrap' name collision as the root cause. BUG#2675 PR#2676

v9.10.0

Version 9.10.0 introduces instrumentation for DynamoDB, adds a new feature to automatically apply nonces from the Rails content security policy, fixes a bug that would cause an expected error to negatively impact a transaction's Apdex, and fixes the agent's autostart logic so that by default rails runner and rails db commands will not cause the agent to start.

• Feature: Add instrumentation for DynamoDB

  The agent has added instrumentation for the aws-sdk-dynamodb gem. The agent will now record datastore spans for DynamoDB client calls made with the aws-sdk-dynamodb gem. PR#2642

• Feature: Automatically apply nonces from the Rails content security policy

  To auto-inject browser monitoring with the New Relic Ruby agent, you either need to set your content security policy to 'unsafe-inline' or provide a nonce. Previously, the only way to provide a nonce was by using the NewRelic::Agent.browser_timing_header API. Now, when a Rails application uses the content security policy configuration to add a nonce, the nonce will be automatically applied to the browser agent. A new configuration option, browser_monitoring.content_security_policy_nonce, toggles this feature. It is on by default. Thank you @baldarn for submitting this feature! PR#2544

• Bugfix: Expected errors related to HTTP status code, class, and message won't impact Apdex

  The agent is supposed to prevent observed application errors from negatively impacting Apdex if the errors are either ignored or expected. There are two ways for the agent to expect an error: via the notice_error API receiving an expected: true argument or via matches made against user-configured lists for expected HTTP status codes (:'error_collector.expected_status_codes'), expected error classes (:'error_collector.expected_classes'), or expected error messages (:'error_collector.expected_messages'). Previously, only errors expected via the notice_error API were correctly prevented from impacting Apdex. Expected errors set by configuration incorrectly impacted Apdex. This behavior has been fixed and now both types of expected errors will correctly not impact Apdex. Thanks very much to @florianpilz for bringing this issue to our attention. PR#2619

• Bugfix: Do not start the agent automatically when rails runner or rails db commands are ran

  PR#2239 taught the agent how to recognize bin/rails based contexts that it should not automatically start up in. But bin/rails runner and bin/rails db commands would still see the agent start automatically. Those 2 contexts will now no longer see the agent start automatically. Thank you to @jdelStrother for both bringing the bin/rails context to our attention and for letting us know about the bin/rails runner and bin/rails db outliers that still needed fixing. PR#2623

  Older agent versions that are still supported by New Relic can update to the new list of denylisted constants by having the following line added to the newrelic.yml configuration file:

    autostart.denylisted_constants: "Rails::Command::ConsoleCommand,Rails::Command::CredentialsCommand,Rails::Command::Db::System::ChangeCommand,Rails::Command::DbConsoleCommand,Rails::Command::DestroyCommand,Rails::Command::DevCommand,Rails::Command::EncryptedCommand,Rails::Command::GenerateCommand,Rails::Command::InitializersCommand,Rails::Command::NotesCommand,Rails::Command::RakeCommand,Rails::Command::RoutesCommand,Rails::Command::RunnerCommand,Rails::Command::SecretsCommand,Rails::Console,Rails::DBConsole"

v9.9.0

Version 9.9.0 introduces support for AWS Lambda serverless function observability, adds support for Elasticsearch 8.13.0, and adds the 'request.temperature' attribute to chat completion summaries in ruby-openai instrumentation.

• Feature: Serverless Mode for AWS Lambda

  The Ruby agent is now capable of operating in a quick and light serverless mode suitable for observing AWS Lambda function invocations. For serverless use, the agent is delivered by a New Relic Lambda layer that can be associated with a Lambda function. All reported data will appear in New Relic's dedicated serverless UI views. Only AWS based Lambda functions are supported for now, though support for other cloud hosted serverless offerings may be added in future depending on Ruby customer demand. The serverless functionality is only intended for use with the official New Relic Ruby layers for Lambda. Any existing workflows that involve the manual use of the Ruby agent in an AWS Lambda context without a New Relic layer should not be impacted.

  For more details, see our getting started guide.

• Feature: Add support for Elasticsearch 8.13.0

  Elasticsearch 8.13.0 increased the number of arguments used in the method the agent instruments, Elastic::Transport::Client#perform_request. Now, the agent supports a variable number of arguments for the instrumented method to prevent future ArgumentErrors.

• Bugfix: Add 'request.temperature' to ruby-openai chat completion summaries

  Previously, the agent was not reporting the request.temperature attribute on LlmChatCompletionSummary events through ruby-openai instrumentation. We are now reporting this attribute.

v9.8.0

Version 9.8.0 introduces instrumentation for ruby-openai, adds the option to store tracer state on the thread-level, hardens the browser agent insertion logic to better proactively anticipate errors, and prevents excpetions from being raised in the Active Support Broadcast logger instrumentation.

• Feature: Add instrumentation for ruby-openai

  Instrumentation has been added for the ruby-openai gem, supporting versions 3.4.0 and higher (PR#2442). While ruby-openai instrumentation is enabled by default, the configuration option ai_monitoring.enabled is disabled by default and controls all AI monitoring. ai_monitoring.enabled must be set to true in order to receive ruby-openai instrumentation. High-Security Mode must be disabled in order to receive AI monitoring.

  Calls to embedding and chat completion endpoints are automatically traced. These events can be enhanced with the introduction of two new APIs. Custom attributes can also be added to LLM events using the API NewRelic::Agent.add_custom_attributes, but they must be prefixed with llm.. For example, NewRelic::Agent.add_custom_attributes({'llm.user_id': user_id}).

• Feature: Add AI monitoring APIs

  This version introduces two new APIs that allow users to record additional information on LLM events:

  • NewRelic::Agent.record_llm_feedback_event - Records user feedback events.
  • NewRelic::Agent.set_llm_token_count_callback - Sets a callback proc for calculating token_count attributes for embedding and chat completion message events.

  Visit RubyDoc for more information on each of these APIs.

• Feature: Store tracer state on thread-level

  A new configuration option, thread_local_tracer_state, stores New Relic's tracer state on the thread-level, as opposed to the default fiber-level storage. This configuration is turned off by default. Our thanks go to community member @markiz who contributed the idea, code, configuration option, and tests for this new feature! PR#2475.

• Bugfix: Harden the browser agent insertion logic

  With Issue#2462, community member @miry explained that it was possible for an HTTP response headers hash to have symbols for values. Not only would these symbols prevent the inclusion of the New Relic browser agent tag in the response body, but more importantly they would cause an exception that would bubble up to the monitored web application itself. With PR#2465 symbol based values are now supported and all other potential future exceptions are now handled. Additionally, the refactor to support symbols has been shown through benchmarking to give the processing of string and mixed type hashes a slight speed boost too.

• Bugfix: Prevent Exception in Active Support Broadcast logger instrumentation

  Previously, in certain situations the agent could cause an exception to be raised when attempting to interact with a broadcast log event. This has been fixed. Thanks to @nathan-appere for reporting this issue and providing a fix! PR#2510

v9.7.1

Version 9.7.1 fixes a ViewComponent instrumentation bug and enforces maximum size limits for custom event attributes.

• Bugfix: Stop suppressing ViewComponent errors

  Previously, the agent suppressed ViewComponent render errors. The agent now reports these errors and allows them to raise. Thank you @mjacobus for reporting this bug and providing a fix! PR#2410

• Bugfix: Enforce maximum size limits for custom event attributes

  Previously, the agent would allow custom event attributes to be any size. This would lead to the New Relic backend dropping attributes larger than the maximum size. Now, the agent will truncate custom event attribute values to 4095 characters, attribute names to 255 characters, and the total count of attributes to 64. PR#2401

v9.7.0

Version 9.7.0 introduces ViewComponent instrumentation, changes the endpoint used to access the cluster name for Elasticsearch instrumentation, removes the creation of the Ruby/Thread and Ruby/Fiber spans, and adds support for Falcon.

• Feature: ViewComponent instrumentation

  ViewComponent is a now an instrumented library. PR#2367

• Feature: Use root path to access Elasticsearch cluster name

  Previously, the agent used the cluster health endpoint (/_cluster/health) to access the cluster name. However, this has been found to make startup unstable for large clusters. Now, the agent uses the more performant root endpoint (/).

  Our thanks go to @erikkessler1, @gremerritt, and @joshbranham for reporting the issue, suggesting solutions, and testing them. Issue#2360 PR#2377

• Feature: Remove base64 dependency, use direct calls to String methods

  In version 9.6.0, the agent required the Ruby base64 gem as a depdendency to prepare for deprecation warnings in Ruby 3.3 and the gem's removal from the Ruby standard libraries in 3.4. Including base64 as a dependency has caused problems with version resolution in some environments.

  To resolve this, the agent now directly calls the String methods used in the base64 library in the new NewRelic::Base64 module.

  Thank you, @Earlopain, for submitting this change. PR#2378

• Feature: Add Falcon support

  The agent now supports the web server Falcon. PR#2383

• Feature: Remove spans with name Ruby/Thread and Ruby/Fiber

  Due to the lack of helpful information and the confusion commonly caused by the spans named Ruby/Thread and Ruby/Fiber, these spans have been removed. However, the agents ability to monitor instrumented code running in a thread or fiber will remain unchanged. PR#2389

v9.6.0

Version 9.6.0 adds instrumentation for Async::HTTP, Ethon, and HTTPX, adds the ability to ignore specific routes with Roda, gleans Docker container IDs from cgroups v2-based containers, records additional synthetics attributes, fixes an issue with Rails 7.1 that could cause duplicate log records to be sent to New Relic, fixes a deprecation warning for the Sidekiq error handler, adds additional attributes for OpenTelemetry compatibility, and resolves some technical debt, thanks to the community.

• Feature: Add instrumentation for Async::HTTP

  The agent will now record spans for Async::HTTP requests. Versions 0.59.0 and above of the async-http gem are supported. PR#2272

• Feature: Add instrumentation for Ethon

  Instrumentation has been added for the Ethon HTTP client gem. Versions 0.12.0 and above are supported. The agent will now record external request segments for invocations of Ethon::Easy#perform and Ethon::Multi#perform. NOTE: The Typhoeus gem is maintained by the same team that maintains Ethon and depends on Ethon for its functionality. To prevent duplicate reporting for each HTTP request, the Ethon instrumentation will be disabled when Typhoeus is detected. PR#2260

• Feature: Add instrumentation for HTTPX

  The agent now offers instrumentation for the HTTP client HTTPX, provided the gem is at version 1.0.0 or above. PR#2278

• Feature: Prevent the agent from starting in "rails" commands in Rails 7

  Previously, the agent ignored many Rails commands by default, such as rails routes, using Rake-specific logic. This was accomplished by setting these commands as default values for the config option autostart.denylisted_rake_tasks. However, Rails 7 no longer uses Rake for these commands, causing the agent to start running and attempting to record data when running these commands. The commands have now been added to the default value for the config option autostart.denylisted_constants, which will allow the agent to recognize these commands correctly in Rails 7 and prevent the agent from starting during ignored tasks. Note that the agent will continue to start-up when the rails server and rails runner commands are invoked. PR#2239

• Feature: Glean Docker container ID for cgroups v2-based containers

  Previously, the agent was only capable of determining a host Docker container's ID if the container was based on cgroups v1. Now, containers based on cgroups v2 will also have their container IDs reported to New Relic. PR#2229.

• Feature: Update events with additional synthetics attributes when available

  The agent will now record additional synthetics attributes on synthetics events if these attributes are available. PR#2203

• Feature: Declare a gem dependency on the Ruby Base 64 gem 'base64'

  For compatibility with Ruby 3.4 and to silence compatibility warnings present in Ruby 3.3, declare a dependency on the base64 gem. The New Relic Ruby agent uses the native Ruby base64 gem for Base 64 encoding/decoding. The agent is joined by Ruby on Rails (rails/rails@3e52adf) and others in making this change in preparation for Ruby 3.3/3.4. PR#2238

• Feature: Add Roda support for the newrelic_ignore* family of methods

  The agent can now selectively disable instrumentation for particular requests within Roda applications. Supported methods include:

  • newrelic_ignore: ignore a given route.
  • newrelic_ignore_apdex: exclude a given route from consideration in overall Apdex calculations.
  • newrelic_ignore_enduser: prevent automatic injection of the page load timing JavaScript when a route is rendered.

  For more information, see Roda Instrumentation. PR#2267

• Feature: Add additional span attributes for OpenTelemetry compatibility

  For improved compatibility with OpenTelemetry's semantic conventions, the agent's datastore (for databases) and external request (for HTTP clients) segments have been updated with additional attributes.

  Datastore segments now offer 3 additional attributes:

  • db.system: The database system. For Ruby we use the database adapter name here.
  • server.address: The database host.
  • server.port: The database port.

  External request segments now offer 3 additional attributes:

  • http.request.method: The HTTP method (ex: 'GET')
  • server.address: The target host.
  • server.port: The target port.

  For maximum backwards compatibility, no existing attributes have been renamed or removed. PR#2283

• Bugfix: Stop sending duplicate log events for Rails 7.1 users

  Rails 7.1 introduced the public API ActiveSupport::BroadcastLogger. This logger replaces a private API, ActiveSupport::Logger.broadcast. In Rails versions below 7.1, the agent uses the broadcast method to stop duplicate logs from being recoded by broadcasted loggers. Now, we've updated the code to provide a similar duplication fix for the ActiveSupport::BroadcastLogger class. PR#2252

• Bugfix: Resolve Sidekiq 8.0 error handler deprecation warning

  Sidekiq 8.0 will require procs passed to the error handler to include three arguments: error, context, and config. Users running sidekiq/main would receive a deprecation warning with this change any time an error was raised within a job. Thank you, @fukayatsu for your proactive fix! PR#2261

• Community: Resolve technical debt

  We also received some great contributions from community members to resolve some outstanding technical debt issues. Thank you for your contributions!

  • Add and Replace SLASH and ROOT constants: PR#2256 chahmedejaz
  • Remove pry as a dev dependency: PR#2665, PR#2273, AlajeBash (profile no longer active)
  • Replace "start up" with "start-up": PR#2249 chahmedejaz
  • Remove unused variables in test suites: PR#2250

v9.5.0

Version 9.5.0 introduces Stripe instrumentation, allows the agent to record additional response information on a transaction when middleware instrumentation is disabled, introduces new :'sidekiq.args.include' and :'sidekiq.args.exclude: configuration options to permit capturing only certain Sidekiq job arguments, updates Elasticsearch datastore instance metrics, and fixes a bug in NewRelic::Rack::AgentHooks.needed?.

• Feature: Add Stripe instrumentation

  Stripe calls are now automatically instrumented. Additionally, new :'stripe.user_data.include' and :'stripe.user_data.exclude' configuration options permit capturing custom user_data key-value pairs that can be stored in Stripe events. No user_data key-value pairs are captured by default. The agent currently supports Stripe versions 5.38.0+. PR#2180

• Feature: Report transaction HTTP status codes when middleware instrumentation is disabled

  Previously, when disable_middleware_instrumentation was set to true, the agent would not record the value of the response code or content type on the transaction. This was due to the possibility that a middleware could alter the response, which would not be captured by the agent when the middleware instrumentation was disabled. However, based on customer feedback, the agent will now report the HTTP status code and content type on a transaction when middleware instrumentation is disabled. PR#2175

• Feature: Permit capturing only certain Sidekiq job arguments

  New :'sidekiq.args.include' and :'sidekiq.args.exclude' configuration options have been introduced to permit fine grained control over which Sidekiq job arguments (args) are reported to New Relic. By default, no Sidekiq args are reported. To report any Sidekiq options, the :'attributes.include' array must include the string 'jobs.sidekiq.args.*'. With that string in place, all arguments will be reported unless one or more of the new include/exclude options are used. The :'sidekiq.args.include' option can be set to an array of strings. Each of those strings will be passed to Regexp.new and collectively serve as an allowlist for desired args. For job arguments that are hashes, if a hash's key matches one of the include patterns, then both the key and its corresponding value will be included. For scalar arguments, the string representation of the scalar will need to match one of the include patterns to be captured. The :'sidekiq.args.exclude' option works similarly. It can be set to an array of strings that will each be passed to Regexp.new to create patterns. These patterns will collectively serve as a denylist for unwanted job args. Any hash key, hash value, or scalar that matches an exclude pattern will be excluded (not sent to New Relic). PR#2177

  newrelic.yml examples:

  Any string in the :'sidekiq.args.include' or :'sidekiq.args.exclude' arrays will be turned into a regular expression. Knowledge of Ruby regular expression support can be leveraged but is not required. If regular expression syntax is not used, inexact matches will be performed and the string "Fortune" will match both "Fortune 500" and "Fortune and Glory". For exact matches, use regular expression anchors.

  # Include any argument whose string representation matches either "apple" or "banana"
  # The "apple" pattern will match both "green apple" and "red apple"
  sidekiq.args.include:
    - apple
    - banana
  
  # Exclude any arguments that match either "grape", "orange", or "pear"
  sidekiq.args.exclude:
    - grape
    - orange
    - pear
  
  # Exclude any argument that is a 9 digit number
  sidekiq.args.exclude:
    - '\d{9}'
  
  # Include anything that starts with "blue" but exclude anything that ends in "green"
  sidekiq.args.include
    - '^blue'
  
  sidekiq.args.exclude
    - 'green$'

• Bugfix: Update Elasticsearch datastore instance metric to use port instead of path

  Previously, the Elasticsearch datastore instance metric (Datastore/instance/Elasticsearch/<host>/*) used the path as the final value. This caused a metrics grouping issue for some users, as every document ID created a unique metric. Now, the datastore instance metric has been updated to use the port as the final value. This also has the benefit of being more accurate for datastore instance metrics, as this port is directly associated with the already listed host.

• Bugfix: Resolve inverted logic of NewRelic::Rack::AgentHooks.needed?

  Previously, NewRelic::Rack::AgentHooks.needed? incorrectly used inverted logic. This has now been resolved, allowing AgentHooks to be installed when disable_middleware_instrumentation is set to true. PR#2175

v9.4.2

Version 9.4.2 of the agent re-addresses the 9.4.0 issue of NoMethodError seen when using the uppy-s3_multipart gem.

• Bugfix: Resolve NoMethodError

  Ruby agent 9.4.1 attempted to fix a NoMethodError introduced in 9.4.0. A missing require prevented a method from scoping appropriately and has now been added. Thanks to @spickermann and @ColinOrr for working with us to get this resolved. PR#2167

v9.4.1

Version 9.4.1 of the agent resolves a NoMethodError introduced in 9.4.0.

• Bugfix: Resolve NoMethodError

  Ruby agent 9.4.0 introduced Roda instrumentation, which caused a NoMethodError to be raised when attempting to name a Roda transaction. This has been fixed. Thanks to @spickermann for reporting this issue. PR#2167

v9.4.0

Version 9.4.0 of the agent adds Roda instrumentation, adds a new allow_all_headers configuration option to permit capturing all HTTP headers, introduces improved error tracking functionality by associating a transaction id with each error, and uses more reliable network timeout logic.

• Feature: Add Roda instrumentation

  Roda is a now an instrumented framework. The agent currently supports Roda versions 3.19.0+. PR#2144

• Feature: New allow_all_headers configuration option

  A new allow_all_headers configuration option brings parity with the Node.js agent to capture all HTTP request headers.

  This configuration option:

  • Defaults to false
  • Is not compatible with high security mode
  • Requires Rack version 2 or higher (as does Ruby on Rails version 5 and above)
  • Respects all existing behavior for the attributes.include and attributes.exclude configuration options
  • Captures the additional headers as attributes prefixed with request.headers.

  This work was done in response to a feature request submitted by community member @jamesarosen. Thank you very much, @jamesarosen! Issue#1029

• Feature: Improved error tracking transaction linking

  Errors tracked and sent to the New Relic errors inbox will now be associated with a transaction id to enable improved UI/UX associations between transactions and errors. PR#2035

• Feature: Use Net::HTTP native timeout logic

  In line with current Ruby best practices, make use of Net::HTTP's own timeout logic and avoid the use of Timeout.timeout() when possible. The agent's data transmissions and cloud provider detection routines have been updated accordingly. PR#2147

v9.3.1

Version 9.3.1 of the agent fixes NewRelic::Agent.require_test_helper.

• Bugfix: Fix NewRelic::Agent.require_test_helper

  Version 9.3.0 of the agent made a change to the files distributed with the gem. This change unintentionally broke the NewRelic::Agent.require_test_helper API by removing the test/agent_helper.rb file. The file has been added back to the gem. This change also removes the lib/new_relic/build.rb file from the list because it is no longer created with our current release process.

  Our thanks go to @ajesler for reporting this issue and writing a test for the bug. Issue#2113, PR#2115, Issue#2117, PR#2118

• Source Documentation: update the Rack spec URL

  Community member @olleolleolle noticed that our source code was referencing a now defunct URL for the Rack specification and submitted PR#2121 to update it. He also provided a terrific recommendation that we automate the checking of links to proactively catch defunct ones in future. Thanks, @olleolleolle!

v9.3.0

Version 9.3.0 of the agent adds log-level filtering, adds custom attributes for log events, and updates instrumentation for Action Cable. It also provides fixes for how Fiber args are treated, Code-Level Metrics, unnecessary files being included in the gem, and NewRelic::Agent::Logging::DecoratingFormatter#clear_tags! being incorrectly private.

• Feature: Filter forwarded logs based on level

  Previously, all log events, regardless of their level, were forwarded to New Relic when log forwarding was enabled. Now, you may specify the lowest log level you'd like forwarded to New Relic.

  Configuration name	Default	Behavior	Valid values
  application_logging.forwarding.log_level	debug	Sets the minimum log level for events forwarded to New Relic	debug, info, warn, error, fatal, unknown

  This setting uses Ruby's Logger::Severity constants integer values to determine precedence.

• Feature: Custom attributes for logs

  You can now add custom attributes to log events forwarded to New Relic! You can pass these attributes using an API and/or a configuration option.

  Configuration name	Default	Behavior
  application_logging.forwarding.custom_attributes	{}	A hash with key/value pairs to add as custom attributes to all log events forwarded to New Relic. If sending using an environment variable, the value must be formatted like: "key1=value1,key2=value2"

  Call the API using NewRelic::Agent.add_custom_log_attributes and passing your attributes as a hash. For example, you could call: NewRelic::Agent.add_custom_log_attributes(dyno: ENV['DYNO'], pod_name: ENV['POD_NAME']), to add the attributes dyno and pod_name to your log events.

  Attributes passed to the API or the configuration will be added to all log events.

  Thanks to @rajpawar02 for raising this issue and @askreet for helping us with the solution. Issue#1141, PR#2084, PR#2087

• Feature: Instrument transmit_subscription-related Action Cable actions

  This change subscribes the agent to the Active Support notifications for:

  • transmit_subscription_confirmation.action_cable
  • transmit_subscription_rejection.action_cable

• Bugfix: Removed unwanted files from being included in file_list in gemspec

  Previously, the agent was including some files in the gem that were not needed but added to the size of the gem. These files will no longer be included. Thanks to @manuraj17 for the contribution! PR#2089

• Bugfix: Report Code-Level Metrics for Rails controller methods

  Controllers in Rails automatically render views with names that correspond to valid routes. This means that a controller method may not have a corresponding method in the controller class. Code-Level Metrics now report on these methods and don't log false warnings. Thanks to @jcrisp for reporting this issue. PR#2061

• Bugfix: Code-Level Metrics for ActiveRecord models

  Classes that inherit from ActiveRecord were not reporting Code-Level Metrics due to an error in the agent when identifying the class name. This has been fixed and Code-Level Metrics will now report for ActiveRecord models. Thanks to @abigail-rolling for reporting this issue. PR#2092.

• Bugfix: Private method clear_tags! for NewRelic::Agent::Logging::DecoratingFormatter

  As part of a refactor included in a previous release of the agent, the method NewRelic::Agent::Logging::DecoratingFormatter#clear_tags! was incorrectly made private. This method is now public again. Thanks to @dark-panda for reporting this issue. PR#

• Bugfix: Fix the way args are handled for Fibers

  Previously, the agent treated Fiber args the same as it was treating Thread args, which is not correct. Args are passed to Fiber#resume, and not Fiber.new. This has been fixed, and the agent will properly preserve args for both Fiber and Thread classes. This also caused an error to occur when using Async 2.6.2, due to mismatching initalize definitions for Fiber prepended modules. This has been fixed as well. Thanks to @travisbell for bringing this to our attention. PR#2083

v9.2.2

Version 9.2.2 of the agent fixes a bug with the Transaction#finished? method.

• Bugfix: Transaction#finished? no longer throws a NoMethodError when initial_segment is nil

  This change adds a safe navigation operator to Transaction#finished? to prevent NoMethodErrors when a transaction does not have any segments. Our thanks goes to @JulienDefrance for reporting this issue. PR#1983

v9.2.1

Version 9.2.1 fixes a bug causing the agent to continue storing data on finished transactions, and a bug preventing errors from being expected.

• Bugfix: Finished transactions continue to store data on different threads

  Previously, when a new thread was spawned the agent would continue using the current transaction to record data on, even if this transaction had finished already in a different thread. Now the agent will only use the current transaction in the new thread if it is not yet finished. Thank you to @fcheung for reporting this bug and providing us with an extremely helpful reproduction to debug. PR#1969

• Bugfix: Expected Errors passed to notice_error are expected again

  A bug was introduced in 9.1.0 that caused to agent not to mark errors as expected if the error was passed in to notice_error using the expected: true parameter. This has been fixed and errors will now be marked as expected, as expected. Thank you very much to @eiskrenkov for finding this bug and contributing a fix for it! PR#1954

v9.2.0

Version 9.2.0 of the agent introduces some performance improvements for working with high numbers of nested actions, and deprecates instrumentation for the memcached and memcache-client gems (with dalli still being supported).

• Feature: Enhance performance for handling high numbers of nested actions

  With Issue#1910 community members @parkerfinch and @travisbell informed us of some CPU spikes and process hangs seen only when using the agent's thread instrumentation, which was enabled by default with v9.0. When thread instrumentation is enabled, instrumented actions taking place within threads are seen and reported on by the agent whereas they would have previously gone unnoticed. This is a great improvement to the agent's usefulness in an async context, and also makes it easier for higher numbers of nested actions to be observed. For example, if an instrumented background job framework (Sidekiq, Resque) kicks off a job that the agent notices and then that job in turn performs actions such as database queries that the agent also instruments, nested actions are seen. However, with very high (10,000+) numbers of actions nested within a single instrumented outer action, the agent would struggle to efficiently crunch through all of the collected data at the time when the outer action finished. The agent should now be much more efficient when any observed action with lots of nested actions is finished. Our performance testing was conducted with hundreds of thousands of nested actions taking place, and we hope that the benefits of thread tracing can now be enjoyed without any drawbacks. Thanks very much @parkerfinch and @travisbell! PR#1927

• Feature: The agent configuration will now reflect whether module prepending or method chaining was used for instrumentation

  For :'instrumentation.*' configuration parameters that are set to :auto (the default), the agent will automatically determine whether to use module prepending or method chaining. The agent will now update its in-memory configuration to give each relevant parameter a value of either :prepend or :chain so that the result of the determination can be introspected. This is intended to help 3rd party libraries that wish to further enhance the agent's instrumentation capabilities by prepending or chaining additional logic. Environment variable, YAML file, and server-side configuration based values are not impacted. PR#1930

• Feature: Deprecate memcached and memcache-client instrumentation

  Instrumentation for the memcached and memcache-client libraries is deprecated and will be removed during the next major release.

v9.1.0

Version 9.1.0 of the agent delivers support for two new errors inbox features: error fingerprinting and user tracking, identifies the Amazon Timestream data store, removes Distributed Tracing warnings from agent logs when using Sidekiq, fixes bugs, and is tested against the recently released JRuby 9.4.2.0.

• Feature: Error fingerprinting - supply your own errors inbox group names

  Are your error occurrences grouped poorly? Set your own error fingerprint via a callback function. A new set_error_group_callback public API method has been added that will accept a user defined proc. The proc will be invoked for each noticed error and whenever it returns a string, that string will be used as the error group name for the error and will take precedence over any server-side grouping that takes place with the New Relic errors inbox. This gives users much greater control over the grouping of their errors.

  The customer defined proc will be expected to receive exactly one input argument, a hash. The hash contains the following:

  Key	Value
  :error	The Ruby error class instance. Offers #class, #message, and #backtrace
  :customAttributes	Any customer defined custom attributes for the current transaction
  :'request.uri'	The current request URI if available
  :'http.statusCode'	The HTTP status code (200, 404, etc.) if available
  :'http.method'	The HTTP method (GET, PUT, etc.) if available
  :'error.expected'	Whether (true) or not (false) the error was expected
  :'options'	The options hash passed to NewRelic::Agent.notice_error

  The callback only needs to be set once per initialization of the New Relic agent.

  Example usage:

  proc = proc { |hash| "Access" if hash[:'http.statusCode'] == 401 }
  NewRelic::Agent.set_error_group_callback(proc)
  

• Feature: User tracking - associate errors with a user id

  You can now see the number of users impacted by an error group. Identify the end user with a new set_user_id public API method that will accept a string representation of a user id and associate that user id with the current transaction. Transactions and errors will then have a new enduser.id agent attribute associated with them. This will allow agent users to tag transactions and errors as belonging to given user ids in support of greater filtering and alerting capabilities.

• Identify Amazon Timestream when the amazon_timestream AR adapter is used

  When the agent sees the activerecord-amazon-timestream-adapter gem being used, it will now identify the data store as "Timestream". Thanks very much to @wagner for contributing this enhancement! PR#1872

• Bugfix: Remove Distributed Tracing related warnings from agent logs when headers are not present in Sidekiq

  Previously, the agent would log a warning to newrelic_agent.log every time it attempted to accept empty Distributed Tracing headers from Sidekiq jobs which could result in an excessive number of warnings. Now the agent will no longer create these warnings when using Sidekiq. PR#1834

• Bugfix: Log request headers in debug-level logs instead of human-readable Objects

  Previously, the agent sometimes received children of the NewRelic::Agent::HTTPClients::AbstractRequest class as an argument when NewRelic::Agent::Transaction::DistributedTracers#log_request_headers was called. This caused debug-level log messages that print the request headers to show human-readable Objects (ex. #<NewRelic::Agent::HTTPClients::HTTPClientRequest:0x00007fd0dda983e0>) instead of the request headers. Now, the hash of the request headers should always be logged. PR#1839

• Bugfix: Fix undefined method controller_path logged in Action Controller Instrumentation

  Previously, the agent could log an error when trying to determine the metric name in the Action Controller instrumentation if the controller class did not respond to controller_path. This has been resolved and the agent will no longer call this method unless the class responds to it. Thank you to @gsar for letting us know about this issue. PR#1844

• Bugfix: Fix Transaction#finish exception and decrease log level for related warning during async transactions

  Previously, the agent would raise a non-fatal error when a segment without a parent was unfinished when the transaction completed. This error was raised while constructing a warn-level log message. Now that Thread instrumentation is on by default, this log message emits more frequently and is less concerning. In cases where we see a Thread, Fiber, or concurrent-ruby segment in a transaction, the message will be degraded to a debug-level. Thanks to @NielsKSchjoedt for creating the issue and @boomer196 for testing solutions. PR#1876

• CI: Target JRuby 9.4.2.0

  The agent is now actively being tested against JRuby 9.4.2.0. NOTE that this release does not contain any non-CI related changes for JRuby. Old agent versions are still expected to work with newer JRubies and the newest agent version is still expected to work with older JRubies.

v9.0.0

Version 9.0.0 of the agent removes several deprecated configuration options and API methods, enables Thread tracing by default, adds Fiber instrumentation, removes support for Ruby versions 2.2 and 2.3, removes instrumentation for several deprecated gems, changes how the API method set_transaction_name works, and updates rails_defer_initialization to be an environment variable only configuration option.

• Remove deprecated configuration options

  The following configuration options have been removed and will no longer work. Please update all configs to use the replacements listed below. PR#1782

  Removed	Replacement	newrelic.yml example
  analytics_events.capture_attributes	transaction_events.attributes.enabled	transaction_events.attributes.enabled: false
  browser_monitoring.capture_attributes	browser_monitoring.attributes.enabled	browser_monitoring.attributes.enabled: false
  error_collector.capture_attributes	error_collector.attributes.enabled	error_collector.attributes.enabled: false
  resque.capture_params	attributes.include	attributes.include: ['job.resque.args.*']
  sidekiq.capture_params	attributes.include	attributes.include: ['job.sidekiq.args.*']
  transaction_tracer.capture_attributes	transaction_tracer.attributes.enabled	transaction_tracer.attributes.enabled: false
  error_collector.ignore_errors	error_collector.ignore_classes	error_collector.ignore_classes: ['ActionController::RoutingError', 'CustomError']
  analytics_events.enabled	transaction_events.enabled	transaction_events.enabled: false
  analytics_events.max_samples_stored	transaction_events.max_samples_stored	transaction_events.max_samples_stored: 1200
  disable_database_instrumentation	disable_sequel_instrumentation	disable_sequel_instrumentation: true
  disable_bunny	instrumentation.bunny	instrumentation.bunny: disabled
  disable_curb	instrumentation.curb	instrumentation.curb: disabled
  disable_dj	instrumentation.delayed_job	instrumentation.delayed_job: disabled
  disable_excon	instrumentation.excon	instrumentation.excon: disabled
  disable_grape	instrumentation.grape	instrumentation.grape: disabled
  disable_grape_instrumentation	instrumentation.grape	instrumentation.grape: disabled
  disable_httpclient	instrumentation.httpclient	instrumentation.httpcient: disabled
  disable_httprb	instrumentation.httprb	instrumentation.httprb: disabled
  disable_dalli	instrumentation.memcache	instrumentation.memcache: disabled
  disable_dalli_cas_client	instrumentation.memcache	instrumentation.memcache: disabled
  disable_memcache_client	instrumentation.memcache-client	instrumentation.memcache-client: disabled
  disable_memcache_instrumentation	instrumentation.memcache	instrumentation.memcache: disabled
  disable_memcached	instrumentation.memcached	instrumentation.memcached: disabled
  disable_mongo	instrumentation.mongo	instrumentation.mongo: disabled
  disable_net_http	instrumentation.net_http	instrumentation.net_http: disabled
  prepend_net_instrumentation	instrumentation.net_http	instrumentation.net_http: prepend
  disable_puma_rack	instrumentation.puma_rack	instrumentation.puma_rack: disabled
  disable_puma_rack_urlmap	instrumentation.puma_rack_urlmap	instrumentation.puma_rack_urlmap: disabled
  disable_rack	instrumentation.rack	instrumentation.rack: disabled
  disable_rack_urlmap	instrumentation.rack_urlmap	instrumentation.rack_urlmap: disabled
  disable_redis	instrumentation.redis	instrumentation.redis: disabled
  disable_redis_instrumentation	instrumentation.redis	instrumentation.redis: disabled
  disable_resque	instrumentation.resque	instrumentation.resque: disabled
  disable_sinatra	instrumentation.sinatra	instrumentation.sinatra: disabled
  disable_rake	instrumentation.rake	instrumentation.rake: disabled
  disable_rake_instrumentation	instrumentation.rake	instrumentation.rake: disabled
  disable_typhoeus	instrumentation.typhoeus	instrumentation.typhoeus: disabled

• Enable Thread instrumentation by default

  The configuration option instrumentation.thread.tracing is now enabled by default. This configuration allows the agent to properly monitor code occurring inside threads. In Ruby agent 9.0, instrumented code within threads will be recorded and associated with the current transaction when the thread was created.

  This may be a breaking change if you are currently using custom thread instrumentation. New transactions inside of threads will no longer be started if one already exists. PR#1767

• Add Fiber instrumentation

  Fiber instances are now automatically instrumented similarly to Thread instances. This can be configured using instrumentation.fiber. PR#1802

• Removed support for Ruby 2.2 and 2.3

  Ruby 2.2 and 2.3 are no longer supported by the Ruby agent. To continue using the latest Ruby Agent version, please update to Ruby 2.4.0 or above. PR#1778

• Removed deprecated instrumentation

  Instrumentation for the following gems had been previously deprecated and has now been removed. PR#1788

  • Acts As Solr
  • Authlogic
  • DataMapper
  • Rainbows
  • Sunspot

  Versions of the following technologies had been previously deprecated and are no longer supported.

  • Passenger: 2.2.x - 4.0.x
  • Puma: 2.0.x
  • Grape: 0.2.0
  • Padrino: 0.14.x
  • Rails: 3.2.x
  • Sinatra: 1.4.x, 1.5.x
  • Mongo: 1.8.x - 2.3.x
  • Sequel: 3.37.x, 4.0.x
  • Delayed_Job: 2.0.x - 4.0.x
  • Sidekiq: 4.2.x
  • Excon: below 0.55.0
  • HttpClient: 2.2.0 - 2.8.0
  • HttpRb: 0.9.9 - 2.2.1
  • Typhoeus: 0.5.3 - 1.2.x
  • Bunny: 2.0.x - 2.6.x
  • ActiveMerchant: 1.25.0 - 1.64.x

• Updated API method set_transaction_name

  When the method NewRelic::Agent.set_transaction_name is called, it will now always change the name and category of the currently running transaction to what is passed into the method. This is a change from previous agent versions.

  Previously, if set_transaction_name was called with a new transaction name and a new category that did not match the category already assigned to a transaction, neither the new name nor category would be saved to the transaction. If this method is being called in a situation in which it was previously ignored due to category differences, this will now change the name and category of the transaction. PR#1797

• Removed API method: NewRelic::Agent.disable_transaction_tracing

  The deprecated API method NewRelic::Agent.disable_transaction_tracing has been removed. Instead use either NewRelic::Agent#ignore_transaction to disable the recording of the current transaction or NewRelic::Agent.disable_all_tracing to yield a block without collecting any metrics or traces in any of the subsequent calls. PR#1792

• Renamed ActiveJob metrics

  Previously, ActiveJob was categorized as a message broker, which is inaccurate. We've updated the naming of ActiveJob traces from leading with MessageBroker/ActiveJob to simply leading with ActiveJob. PR#1811

• Code cleanup

  Thank you to community member @esquith for contributing some cleanup of orphaned constants in our code base. PR#1793 PR#1794 PR#1808

  Community member @fchatterji helped standardize how we reference NewRelic throughout our codebase PR#1795 and updated our README's community header PR#1815. Thanks fchatterji!

• Bugfix: Allow rails initialization to be deferred by environment variable

  The Ruby agent may force some Rails libraries to load on agent initialization, preventing some settings defined in config/initializers from being applied. Changing the initialization process to run after config/initializers, however, may break the configuration for other gems (ex. Roadie Rails).

  For those having troubles with agent initialization and Rails initializers, you can now pass the environment variable NEW_RELIC_DEFER_RAILS_INITIALIZATION=true to make the agent initialize after config/initializers are run. This config option can only be set using an environment variable and can't be set using YAML. PR#1791

  Thanks to @jdelStrother for bringing this issue to our attention and testing our fixes along the way. Issue#662

8.16.0

Version 8.16.0 introduces more Ruby on Rails instrumentation (especially for Rails 6 and 7) for various Action*/Active* libraries whose actions produce Active Support notifications events.

• Add Various Ruby on Rails Library Instrumentations

  New instrumentation is now automatically provided by several Action*/Active* libaries that generate Active Support notifications. With each Ruby on Rails release, new the Rails libraries add new events and sometimes existing events have their payload parameters updated as well. The New Relic Ruby agent will now automatically process more of these events and parameters with New Relic segments created for each event. At a minimum, each segment gives timing information for the event. In several cases, all non-sensitive event payload parameters are also passed along in the segment.

  The agent now newly supports or has updated support for the following libraries:

  • Action Cable (for WebSockets) PR#1749
  • Action Controller (for the 'C' in MVC) PR#1744
  • Action Mailbox (for sending mail) PR#1740
  • Action Mailer (for routing mail) PR#1740
  • Active Job (for background jobs) PR#1742
  • Active Support (for caching operations) PR#1742

  The instrumentations for each of these libaries are all enabled by default, but can be independently disabled via configuration by using the following parameters:

  Configuration name	Default	Behavior
  disable_action_cable	false	If true, disables Action Cable instrumentation.
  disable_action_controller	false	If true, disables Action Controller instrumentation.
  disable_action_mailbox	false	If true, disables Action Mailbox instrumentation.
  disable_action_mailer	false	If true, disables Action Mailer instrumentation.
  disable_activejob	false	If true, disables Active Job instrumentation.
  disable_active_support	false	If true, disables Active Support instrumentation.

8.15.0

Version 8.15.0 of the agent confirms compatibility with Ruby 3.2.0, adds instrumentation for concurrent-ruby, and confirms Sinatra 3 compatibility with Padrino 0.15.2. It also enables batching and compression for Infinite Tracing.

• Add Support for Ruby 3.2.0

  Following the 3.2.0 release of Ruby, the New Relic Ruby Agent has confirmed compatibility with and now supports the official release of Ruby 3.2.0. PR#1715

• Add instrumentation for concurrent-ruby

  Instrumentation for the concurrent-ruby gem has been added to the agent for versions 1.1.5 and above. When a transaction is already in progress and a call to a Concurrent:: method that routes through Concurrent::ThreadPoolExecutor#post is made, a segment will be added to the transaction. Any content within the block passed to the Concurrent:: method that is instrumented by the agent, such as a call to Net::HTTP.get, will have a nested segment created. PR#1682

  Configuration name	Default	Behavior
  instrumentation.concurrent_ruby	auto	Controls auto-instrumentation of the concurrent-ruby library at start-up. May be one of auto, prepend, chain, disabled.

• Infinite Tracing: Use batching and compression

  For Infinite Tracing, which Ruby applications can leverage with the newrelic-infinite_tracing gem, payloads will now be batched and compressed to signficantly decrease the amount of outbound network traffic. PR#1723

  | Configuration name | Default | Behavior | | ------------------------------------ | ------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --- | ------ | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | infinite_tracing.batching | true | If true (the default), data sent to the Trace Observer will be batched instead of each span being sent individually | | infinite_tracing.compression_level | high | Configure the compression level for data sent to the Trace Observer. May be one of [none | low | medium | high]. 'high' is the default. Set the level to 'none' to disable compression. |

• Add Support for Padrino 0.15.2 and Sinatra 3

  We've added testing to confirm Padrino 0.15.2 and Sinatra 3 are compatible with the Ruby agent. Thank you @nesquena for letting us know 0.15.2 was ready! PR#1712

v8.14.0

Version 8.14.0 of the agent restores desired Capistrano-based changelog lookup functionality when a deployment is performed, speeds up GUID generation, delivers support for instrumenting Rails custom event notifications, fixes potential compatibility issues with the RedisClient gem, and fixes bugs related to initialization in Rails.

• Deployment Recipe: Restore desired Capistrano-based changelog lookup behavior

  The New Relic Ruby agent offers a Capistrano recipe for recording app deployments. The recipe code was significantly cleaned up with PR#1498 which inadvertently changed the way the recipe handles the changelog for a deployment. Community member @arthurwozniak spotted and corrected this change in order to restore the desired changelog lookup functionality while retaining all of the previous cleanup. Thank you very much for your contribution, @arthurwozniak! PR#1653

• Speed up GUID generation

  The agent leverages random numbers in its GUID (globally unique identifier) generation and would previously always freshly calculate the result of 16^16 or 32^32 before generating a random number. Given that those 16^16 and 32^32 operations are expected, it makes sense to calculate their results up front and store them in constants to be referred to later. Doing so has resulted in a performance gain for the generation of GUIDs. Many thanks to @tungmq for contributing this optimisation and the benchmarks to support it! PR#1693

• Support for Rails ActiveSupport::Notifications for custom events

  When the new active_support_custom_events_names configuration parameter is set equal to an array of custom event names to subscribe to, the agent will now subscribe to each of the names specified and report instrumentation for the events when they take place. Creating custom events is simple and now reporting instrumentation for them to New Relic is simple as well. PR#1659

• Bugfix: Support older versions of the RedisClient gem, handle unknown Redis database index

  With version 8.13.0 of the agent, support was added for the redis-rb gem v5+ and the new RedisClient gem. With versions of RedisClient older than v0.11, the agent could cause the monitored application to crash when attempting to determine the Redis database index. Version 8.14.0 adds two related improvements. Firstly, support for RedisClient versions older than v0.11 has been added to get at the database index value. Secondly, the agent will no longer crash or impact the monitored application in the event that the database index cannot be obtained. Thank you very much to our community members @mbsmartee and @patatepartie for bringing this issue to our attention, for helping us determine how to best reproduce it, and for testing out the update. We appreciate your help! Issue#1650 PR#1673

• Bugfix: Defer agent startup in Rails until after application-defined initializers have run

  In Rails, the agent previously loaded before any application-defined initializers. This allowed initializers to reference the add_method_tracer API. However, this had the side-effect of forcing some framework libraries to load before initializers ran, preventing any configuration values related to these libraries from being applied. This fix provides an option to split initialization into two parts: load add_method_tracer before application-defined initializers and start the agent after application-defined initializers. This may cause other initializers to behave differently.

  If you'd like to use this feature, set defer_rails_initialization to true. It is false by default, but may become true by default in a future release.

  Furthermore, our Action View instrumentation was missing an ActiveSupport.on_load block around the code that loads our instrumentation.

  Thank you @jdelStrother for bringing this to our attention and collaborating with us on a fix. PR#1658

  Unfortunately, this bugfix is unreachable as written because the configuration value used to access the bugfix won't be applied until after initialization. Follow along for updates at Issue#662.

v8.13.1

Version 8.13.1 of the agent provides a bugfix for Redis v5.0 instrumentation.

• Fix NoMethodError when using Sidekiq v7.0 with RedisClient v0.11

  In some cases, the RedisClient object cannot directly access methods like db, port, or path. These methods are always available on the client.config object. This raised a NoMethodError in environments that used Sidekiq v7.0 and RedisClient v0.11. Thank you to @fcheung and @stevenou for bringing this to our attention! Issue#1639

v8.13.0

Version 8.13.0 of the agent updates our Rack, Redis, and Sidekiq instrumentation. It also delivers some bugfixes.

• Support for Redis v5.0

  Redis v5.0 restructures where some of our instrumented methods are located and how they are named. It also introduces a new instrumentation middleware API. This API is used for pipelined and multi calls to maintain reporting parity with previous Redis versions. However, it is introduced later in the chain, so you may see errors that used to appear at the segment level on the transaction instead. The agent's behavior when used with older supported Redis versions will remain unaffected. PR#1611

• Support for Sidekiq v7.0

  Sidekiq v7.0 removed Delayed Extensions and began offering client and server middleware classes to inherit from. The agent's Sidekiq instrumentation has been updated accordingly. The agent's behavior when used with older Sidekiq versions will remain unaffected. PR#1615 NOTE: an issue was discovered with Sidekiq v7.0+ and addressed by Ruby agent v8.13.1. If you are using Sidekiq, please skip Ruby agent v8.13.0 and use v8.13.1 or above.

• Support for Rack v3.0: Rack::Builder#new accepting a block

  Via rack/rack#1942 (released with Rack v3.0), Rack::Builder#run now optionally accepts a block instead of an app argument. The agent's instrumentation has been updated to support the use of a block with Rack::Builder#run. PR#1600

• Bugfix: Correctly identify Unicorn, Rainbows and FastCGI with Rack v3.0

  Unicorn, Rainbows, or FastCGI web applications using Rack v3.0 may previously have had the "dispatcher" value incorrectly reported as "Webrick" instead of "Unicorn", "Rainbows", or "FastCGI". This issue has now been addressed. PR#1585

• Bugfix: add_method_tracer fails to record code level metric attributes on private methods

  When using add_method_tracer on a private method, the agent was unable to record code level metrics for the method. This resulted in the following being logged to the newrelic_agent.log file.

  WARN : Unable to determine source code info for 'Example', method 'private_method' - NameError: undefined method 'private_method' for class '#<Class:Example>'
  

  Thank you @jdelStrother for bringing this issue to our attention and suggesting a fix! PR#1593

• Bugfix: Category is a required keyword arg for NewRelic::Agent::Tracer.in_transaction

  When support for Ruby 2.0 was dropped in version 8.0.0 of the agent, the agent API methods were updated to use the required keyword argument feature built into Ruby, rather than manually raising ArgumentErrors. The API method NewRelic::Agent::Tracer.in_transaction removed the ArgumentError raised by the agent, but did not update the method arguments to identify :category as a required keyword argument. This is now resolved. Thank you @tatzsuzuki for bringing this to our attention. PR#1587

v8.12.0

Version 8.12.0 of the agent delivers new Elasticsearch instrumentation, increases the default number of recorded Custom Events, announces the deprecation of Ruby 2.3, and brings some valuable code cleanup.

• Support for Elasticsearch instrumentation

  This release adds support to automatically instrument the elasticsearch gem. Versions 7.x and 8.x are supported. PR#1525

  Configuration name	Default	Behavior
  instrumentation.elasticsearch	auto	Controls auto-instrumentation of the elasticsearch library at start-up. May be one of auto, prepend, chain, disabled.
  elasticsearch.capture_queries	true	If true, the agent captures Elasticsearch queries in transaction traces.
  elasticsearch.obfuscate_queries	true	If true, the agent obfuscates Elasticsearch queries in transaction traces.

• Custom Event Limit Increase

  This version increases the default limit of custom events from 1000 events per minute to 3000 events per minute. In the scenario that custom events were being limited, this change will allow more custom events to be sent to New Relic. There is also a new configurable maximum limit of 100,000 events per minute. To change the limits, see the documentation for max_samples_stored. To learn more about the change and how to determine if custom events are being dropped, see our Explorers Hub post. PR#1541

• Deprecate support for Ruby 2.3

  Ruby 2.3 reached end of life on March 31, 2019. The Ruby agent has deprecated support for Ruby 2.3 and will make breaking changes for this version in its next major release, v9.0.0 (release date not yet planned). All 8.x.x versions of the agent will remain compatible with Ruby 2.3.

• Cleanup: Remove orphaned code

  In both the agent and unit tests, changes have taken place over the years that have left certain bits of code unreachable. This orphaned code can complicate code maintenance and refactoring, so getting it squared away can be very helpful. Commmuniy member @ohbarye contributed two separate cleanup PRs for this release; one for the agent and one for the tests. PR#1537 PR#1548

  Thank you to @ohbarye for contributing this helpful cleanup!

v8.11.0

Version 8.11.0 of the agent updates the newrelic deployments command to work with API keys issued to newer accounts, fixes a memory leak in the instrumentation of Curb error handling, further preps for Ruby 3.2.0 support, and includes several community member driven cleanup and improvement efforts. Thank you to everyone involved!

• Added support for New Relic REST API v2 when using newrelic deployments command

  Previously, the newrelic deployments command only supported the older version of the deployments api, which does not currently support newer license keys. Now you can use the New Relic REST API v2 to record deployments by providing your user API key to the agent configuration using api_key. When this configuration option is present, the newrelic deployments command will automatically use the New Relic REST API v2 deployment endpoint. PR#1461

  Thank you to @Arkham for bringing this to our attention!

• Cleanup: Performance tests, constants, rubocop-minitest assertions and refutations

  Community member @esquith contributed a whole slew of cleanup successes for our performance test configuration, orphaned constants in our code base, and RuboCop related improvements. PR#1406 PR#1408 PR#1409 PR#1411

  Thank you @esquith for these great contributions!

• CI: Notify on a change from failure to success

  A super handy, much beloved feature of certain CI and build systems is to not only notify when builds start to fail, but also to notify again when the builds once again start to go green. Community member @luigieai was able to figure out how to configure our existing complex, multiple-3rd-party-action based GitHub Actions pipeline to notify on a switch back to success from failure. PR#1519

  This is much appreciated! Thank you, @luigieai.

• Spelling corrections

  Community member @jsoref, author of the Check Spelling GitHub Action, contributed a significant number of spelling corrections throughout the code base. The intelligent issues that were flagged made for a more comprehensive review than a simple dictionary based check would have been able to provide, and the changes are much appreciated. PR#1508

  Thank you very much, @jsoref!

• Ruby 3.2.0-preview2 compatibility

  Ruby 3.2.0-preview1 introduced a change to the way that Ruby reports VM stats and the approach was changed yet again to a 3rd approach with the preview2 release. New Relic reports on Ruby VM stats and is keeping track of the Ruby 3.2 development process to help ensure our customers with a smooth and worthwhile upgrade process once Ruby 3.2.0 (non-preview) is released. PR#1436

• Bugfix: Fix memory leak in the Curb instrumentation

  Community member @charkost was able to rework the on_failure callback logic prepped via the agent's Curb instrumentation in order to avoid some nesting that was causing memory leaks. PR#1518

  Many thanks for both the heads up on the issue and the fix, @charkost!

v8.10.1

• Bugfix: Missing unscoped metrics when instrumentation.thread.tracing is enabled

  Previously, when instrumentation.thread.tracing was set to true, some puma applications encountered a bug where a varying number of unscoped metrics would be missing. The agent now will correctly store and send all unscoped metrics.

  Thank you to @texpert for providing details of their situation to help resolve the issue.

• Bugfix: gRPC instrumentation causes ArgumentError when other Google gems are present

  Previously, when the agent had gRPC instrumentation enabled in an application using other gems (such as google-ads-googleads), the instrumentation could cause the error ArgumentError: wrong number of arguments (given 3, expected 2). The gRPC instrumentation has been updated to prevent this issue from occurring in the future.

  Thank you to @FeminismIsAwesome for bringing this issue to our attention.

v8.10.0

• New gRPC instrumentation

  The agent will now instrument gRPC activity performed by clients and servers that use the grpc RubyGem. Instrumentation is automatic and enabled by default, so gRPC users should not need to modify any existing application code or agent configuration to benefit from the instrumentation. The instrumentation makes use of distributed tracing for a comprehensive overview of all gRPC traffic taking place across multiple monitored applications. This allows you to observe your client and server activity using any service that adheres to the W3C standard.

  The following new configuration parameters have been added for gRPC. All are optional.

  Configuration name	Default	Behavior
  instrumentation.grpc_client	auto	Set to 'disabled' to disable, set to 'chain' if there are module prepending conflicts
  instrumentation.grpc_server	auto	Set to 'disabled' to disable, set to 'chain' if there are module prepending conflicts
  instrumentation.grpc.host_denylist	""	Provide a comma delimited list of host regex patterns (ex: "private.com$,exception.*")

• Code-level metrics functionality is enabled by default

  The code-level metrics functionality for the Ruby agent's CodeStream integration is now enabled by default after we have received positive feedback and no open bugs for the past two releases.

• Performance: Rework timing range overlap calculations for multiple transaction segments

  Many thanks to GitHub community members @bmulholland and @hkdnet. @bmulholland alerted us to rmosolgo/graphql-ruby#3945. That Issue essentially notes that the New Relic Ruby agent incurs a significant performance hit when the graphql RubyGem (which ships with New Relic Ruby agent support) is used with DataLoader to generate a high number of transactions. Then @hkdnet diagnosed the root cause in the Ruby agent and put together both a proof of concept fix and a full blown PR to resolve the problem. The agent keeps track multiple segments that are concurrently in play for a given transaction in order to merge the ones whose start and stop times intersect. The logic for doing this find-and-merge operation has been reworked to a) be deferred entirely until the transaction is ready to be recorded, and b) made more performant when it is needed. GraphQL DataLoader users and other users who generate lots of activity for monitoring within a short amount of time will hopefully see some good performance gains from these changes.

• Performance: Make frozen string literals the default for the agent

  The Ruby frozen_string_literal: true magic source code comment has now been applied consistently across all Ruby files belonging to the agent. This can provide a performance boost, given that Ruby can rely on the strings remaining immutable. Previously only about a third of the agent's code was freezing string literals by default. Now that 100% of the code freezes string literals by default, we have internally observed some related performance gains through testing. We are hopeful that these will translate into some real world gains in production capacities.

• Bugfix: Error when setting the yaml configuration with transaction_tracer.transaction_threshold: apdex_f

  Originally, the agent was only checking the transaction_tracer.transaction_threshold from the newrelic.yml correctly if it was on two lines.

  Example:

  # newrelic.yml
  transaction_tracer:
    transaction_threshold: apdex_f
  

  When this was instead changed to be on one line, the agent was not able to correctly identify the value of apdex_f.

  Example:

  # newrelic.yml
  transaction_tracer.transaction_threshold: apdex_f
  

  This would cause prevent transactions from finishing due to the error ArgumentError: comparison of Float with String failed. This has now been corrected and the agent is able to process newrelic.yml with a one line transaction_tracer.transaction_threshold: apdex_f correctly now.

  Thank you to @oboxodo for bringing this to our attention.

• Bugfix: Don't modify frozen Logger

  Previously the agent would modify each instance of the Logger class by adding a unique instance variable as part of the instrumentation. This could cause the error FrozenError: can't modify frozen Logger to be thrown if the Logger instance had been frozen. The agent will now check if the object is frozen before attempting to modify the object. Thanks to @mkcosta for bringing this issue to our attention.

v8.9.0

• Add support for Dalli 3.1.0 to Dalli 3.2.2

  Dalli versions 3.1.0 and above include breaking changes where the agent previously hooked into the gem. We have updated our instrumentation to correctly hook into Dalli 3.1.0 and above. At this time, 3.2.2 is the latest Dalli version and is confirmed to be supported.

• Bugfix: Infinite Tracing hung on connection restart

  Previously, when using infinite tracing, the agent would intermittently encounter a deadlock when attempting to restart the infinite tracing connection. This bug would prevent the agent from sending all data types, including non-infinite-tracing-related data. This change reworks how we restart infinite tracing to prevent potential deadlocks.

• Bugfix: Use read_nonblock instead of read on pipe

  Previously, our PipeChannelManager was using read which could cause Resque jobs to get stuck in some versions. This change updates the PipeChannelManager to use read_nonblock instead. This method can leverage error handling to allow the instrumentation to gracefully log a message and exit the stuck Resque job.

v8.8.0

• Support Makara database adapters with ActiveRecord

  Thanks to a community submission from @lucasklaassen with PR #1177, the Ruby agent will now correctly work well with the Makara gem. Functionality such as SQL obfuscation should now work when Makara database adapters are used with Active Record.

• Lowered the minimum payload size to compress

  Previously the Ruby agent used a particularly large payload size threshold of 64KiB that would need to be met before the agent would compress data en route to New Relic's collector. The original value stems from segfault issues that very old Rubies (< 2.2) used to encounter when compressing smaller payloads. This value has been lowered to 2KiB (2048 bytes), which should provide a more optimal balance between the CPU cycles spent on compression and the bandwidth savings gained from it.

• Provide Code Level Metrics for New Relic CodeStream

  For Ruby on Rails applications and/or those with manually traced methods, the agent is now capable of reporting metrics with Ruby method-level granularity. When the new code_level_metrics.enabled configuration parameter is set to a true value, the agent will associate source-code-related metadata with the metrics for things such as Rails controller methods. Then, when the corresponding Ruby class file that defines the methods is loaded up in a New Relic CodeStream-powered IDE, the four golden signals for each method will be presented to the developer directly.

• Supportability Metrics will always report uncompressed payload size

  New Relic's agent specifications call for Supportability Metrics to always reference the uncompressed payload byte size. Previously, the Ruby agent was calculating the byte size after compression. Furthermore, compression is only performed on payloads of a certain size. This means that sometimes the value could have represented a compressed size and sometimes an uncompressed one. Now the uncompressed value is always used, bringing consistency for comparing two instances of the same metric and alignment with the New Relic agent specifications.

v8.7.0

• APM logs-in-context log forwarding on by default

  Automatic application log forwarding is now enabled by default. This version of the agent will automatically send enriched application logs to New Relic. To learn more about this feature see here, and additional configuration options are available here. To learn about how to toggle log ingestion on or off by account see here.

• Improved async support and Thread instrumentation

  Previously, the agent was not able to record events and metrics inside Threads created inside of an already running transaction. This release includes 2 new configuration options to support multithreaded applications to automatically instrument threads. A new configuration option,instrumentation.thread.tracing (disabled by default), has been introduced that, when enabled, will allow the agent to insert New Relic tracing inside of all Threads created by an application. To support applications that only want some threads instrumented by New Relic, a new class is available, NewRelic::TracedThread, that will create a thread that includes New Relic instrumentation, see our API documentation for more details.

  New configuration options included in this release:

  Configuration name	Default	Behavior
  instrumentation.thread	auto (enabled)	Allows the agent to correctly nest spans inside of an asynchronous transaction
  instrumentation.thread.tracing	false (disabled)	Automatically add tracing to all Threads created in the application. This may be enabled by default in a future release.

  We'd like to thank @mikeantonelli for sharing a gist with us that provided our team with an entry point for this feature.

• Deprecate support for Ruby 2.2

  Ruby 2.2 reached end of life on March 31, 2018. The agent has deprecated support for Ruby 2.2 and will make breaking changes for this version in its next major release.

• Deprecate instrumentation versions with low adoption and/or versions over five years old

  This release deprecates the following instrumentation:

  Deprecated	Replacement
  ActiveMerchant < 1.65.0	ActiveMerchant >= 1.65.0
  Acts As Solr (all versions)	none
  Authlogic (all versions)	none
  Bunny < 2.7.0	bunny >= 2.7.0
  Dalli < 3.2.1	Dalli >= 3.2.1
  DataMapper (all versions)	none
  Delayed Job < 4.1.0	Delayed Job >= 4.1.0
  Excon < 0.56.0	Excon >= 0.56.0
  Grape < 0.19.2	Grape >= 0.19.2
  HTTPClient < 2.8.3	HTTPClient 2.8.3
  HTTP.rb < 2.2.2	HTTP.rb >= 2.2.2
  Mongo < 2.4.1	Mongo >= 2.4.1
  Padrino < 0.15.0	Padrino >= 0.15.0
  Passenger < 5.1.3	Passenger >= 5.1.3
  Puma < 3.9.0	Puma >= 3.9.0
  Rack < 1.6.8	Rack >= 1.6.8
  Rails 3.2.x	Rails >= 4.x
  Rainbows (all versions)	none
  Sequel < 4.45.0	Sequel >= 4.45.0
  Sidekiq < 5.0.0	Sidekiq >= 5.0.0
  Sinatra < 2.0.0	Sinatra >= 2.0.0
  Sunspot (all versions)	none
  Typhoeus < 1.3.0	Typhoeus >= 1.3.0
  Unicorn < 5.3.0	Unicorn >= 5.3.0

  For the gems with deprecated versions, we will no longer test those versions in our multiverse suite. They may, however, still be compatible with the agent. We will no longer fix bug reports for issues related to these gem versions.

• Clarify documentation for rake.tasks configuration

  The rake.tasks description in the default newrelic.yml file and the New Relic Ruby Agent Configuration docs have been updated to clarify its behavior and usage. The documentation now reads:

  Specify an array of Rake tasks to automatically instrument. This configuration option converts the Array to a RegEx list. If you'd like to allow all tasks by default, use rake.tasks: [.+]. Rake tasks will not be instrumented unless they're added to this list. For more information, visit the (New Relic Rake Instrumentation docs)[/docs/apm/agents/ruby-agent/background-jobs/rake-instrumentation].

  We thank @robotfelix for suggesting these changes.

• Internally leverage Object.const_get and Object.const_defined?

  When dynamically checking for or obtaining a handle to a class constant from a string, leverage the Object class's built in methods wherever possible to enjoy simpler, more performant operations. All JRubies and CRubies v2.5 and below need a bit of assistance beyond what Object can provide given that those Rubies may yield an unwanted constant from a different namespace than the one that was specified. But for all other Rubies and even for those Rubies in contexts where we can 100% trust the string value coming in, leverage the Object class's methods and reap the benefits.

• Enable Environment Variables setting Array configurations to be converted to Arrays

  Prior to this change, when comma-separated lists were passed as environment variables, an error would be emitted to the newrelic_agent.log and a String would be set as the value. Now, Arrays will be accurately coerced.

• Bugfix: Allow TransactionEvents to be sampled at the expected rate

  The transaction_events.max_samples_stored capacity value within the TransactionEventAggregator did not match up with its expected harvest cycle interval, causing TransactionEvents to be over-sampled. This bugfix builds upon the updates made in #952 so that the interval and capacity behave as expected for the renamed transaction_events* configuration options.

• Bugfix: Error events missing attributes when created outside of a transaction

  Previously the agent was not assigning a priority to error events that were created by calling notice_error outside the scope of a transaction. This caused issues with sampling when the error event buffer was full, resulting in a NoMethodError: undefined method '<' for nil:NilClass in the newrelic_agent.log. This bugfix ensures that a priority is always assigned on error events so that the agent will be able to sample these error events correctly. Thank you to @olleolleolle for bringing this issue to our attention.

v8.6.0

• Telemetry-in-Context: Automatic Application Logs, a quick way to view logs no matter where you are in the platform

  • Adds support for forwarding application logs to New Relic. This automatically sends application logs that have been enriched to power Telemetry-in-Context. This is disabled by default in this release. This may be on by default in a future release.
  • Adds support for enriching application logs written to disk or standard out. This can be used with another log forwarder to power Telemetry-in-Context if in-agent log forwarding is not desired. We recommend enabling either log forwarding or local log decorating, but not both features. This is disabled by default in this release.
  • Improves speed and Resque support for logging metrics which shows the rate of log message by severity in the Logs chart in the APM Summary view. This is enabled by default in this release.

  To learn more about Telemetry-in-Context and the configuration options please see the documentation here.

• Improve the usage of the 'hostname' executable and other executables

  In all places where a call to an executable binary is made (currently this is done only for the 'hostname' and 'uname' binaries), leverage a new helper method when making the call. This new helper will a) not attempt to execute the binary if it cannot be found, and b) prevent STDERR/STDOUT content from appearing anywhere except New Relic's own logs if the New Relic logger is set to the 'debug' level. When calling 'hostname', fall back to Socket.gethostname if the 'hostname' binary cannot be found. When calling 'uname', fall back on using a value of 'unknown' if the 'uname' command fails. Many thanks to @metaskills and @brcarp for letting us know that Ruby AWS Lambda functions can't invoke 'hostname' and for providing ideas and feedback with Issue #697.

• Documentation: remove confusing duplicate RUM entry from newrelic.yml

  The browser_monitoring.auto_instrument configuration option to enable web page load timing (RUM) was confusingly listed twice in the newrelic.yml config file. This option is enabled by default. The newrelic.yml file has been updated to list the option only once. Many thanks to @robotfelix for bringing this to our attention with Issue #955.

• Bugfix: fix unit test failures when New Relic environment variables are present

  Previously, unit tests would fail with unexpected invocation errors when NEW_RELIC_LICENSE_KEY and NEW_RELIC_HOST environment variables were present. Now, tests will discard these environment variables before running.

• Bugfix: Curb - satisfy method_with_tracing's verb argument requirement

  When Curb instrumentation is used (either via prepend or chain), be sure to always pass the verb argument over to method_with_tracing which requires it. Thank you to @knarewski for bringing this issue to our attention, for providing a means of reproducing an error, and for providing a fix. That fix has been replicated by the agent team with permission. See Issue 1033 for more details.

v8.5.0

• AWS: Support IMDSv2 by using a token with metadata API calls

  When querying AWS for instance metadata, include a token in the request headers. If an AWS user configures instances to require a token, the agent will now work. For instances that do not require the inclusion of a token, the agent will continue to work in that context as well.

• Muffle anticipated stderr warnings for "hostname" calls

  When using the hostname binary to obtain hostname information, redirect STDERR to /dev/null. Thanks very much to @frenkel for raising this issue on behalf of OpenBSD users everywhere and for providing a solution with PR #965.

• Added updated configuration options for transaction events and deprecated previous configs This release deprecates and replaces the following configuration options:

  Deprecated	Replacement
  event_report_period.analytic_event_data	event_report_period.transaction_event_data
  analytics_events.enabled	transaction_events.enabled
  analytics_events.max_samples_stored	transaction_events.max_samples_stored

• Eliminated warnings for redefined constants in ParameterFiltering

  Fixed the ParameterFiltering constant definitions so that they are not redefined on multiple reloads of the module. Thank you to @TonyArra for bringing this issue to our attention.

• Docker for development

  Docker and Docker Compose may now be used for local development and testing with the provided Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml files in the project root. See DOCKER.md for usage instructions.

• Bugfix: Rails 5 + Puma errors in rack "can't add a new key into hash during iteration"

  When using rails 5 with puma, the agent would intermittently cause rack to raise a RuntimeError: can't add a new key into hash during iteration. We have identified the source of the error in our instrumentation and corrected the behavior so it no longer interferes with rack. Thanks to @sasharevzin for bringing attention to this error and providing a reproduction of the issue for us to investigate.

• CI: target JRuby 9.3.3.0

  Many thanks to @ahorek for PR #919, PR #921, and PR #922 to keep us up to date on the JRuby side of things. The agent is now actively being tested against JRuby 9.3.3.0. NOTE that this release does not contain any non-CI related changes for JRuby. Old agent versions are still expected to work with newer JRubies and the newest agent version is still expected to work with older JRubies.

• CI: Update unit tests for Rails 7.0.2

  Ensure that the 7.0.2 release of Rails is fully compatible with all relevant tests.

• CI: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

  To stay current and secure, our CI automation is now backed by version 20.04 of Ubuntu's long term support offering (previously 18.04).

v8.4.0

• Provide basic support for Rails 7.0

This release includes Rails 7.0 as a tested Rails version. Updates build upon the agent's current Rails instrumentation and do not include additional instrumentation for new features.

• Improve the performance of NewRelic::Agent::GuidGenerator#generate_guid

This method is called by many basic operations within the agent including transactions, datastore segments, and external request segments. Thank you, @jdelstrother for contributing this performance improvement!

• Documentation: Development environment prep instructions

The multiverse collection of test suites requires a variety of data handling software (MySQL, Redis, memcached, etc.) to be available on the machine running the tests. The project documentation has been updated to outline the relevant software packages, and a Brewfile file has been added to automate software installation with Homebrew.

• Bugfix: Add ControllerInstrumentation::Shims to Sinatra framework

  When the agent is disabled by setting the configuration settings enabled, agent_enabled, and/or monitor_mode to false, the agent loads shims for public controller instrumentation methods. These shims were missing for the Sinatra framework, causing applications to crash if the agent was disabled. Thank you, @NC-piercej for bringing this to our attention!

v8.3.0

• Updated the agent to support Ruby 3.1.0

  Most of the changes involved updating the multiverse suite to exclude runs for older versions of instrumented gems that are not compatible with Ruby 3.1.0. In addition, Infinite Tracing testing was updated to accommodate YAML::unsafe_load for Psych 4 support.

• Bugfix: Update AdaptiveSampler#sampled? algorithm

  One of the clauses in AdaptiveSampler#sampled? would always return false due to Integer division returning a result of zero. This method has been updated to use Float division instead, to exponentially back off the number of samples required. This may increase the number of traces collected for transactions. A huge thank you to @romul for bringing this to our attention and breaking down the problem!

• Bugfix: Correctly encode ASCII-8BIT log messages

  The encoding update for the DecoratingLogger in v8.2.0 did not account for ASCII-8BIT encoded characters qualifying as valid_encoding?. Now, ASCII-8BIT characters will be encoded as UTF-8 and include replacement characters as needed. We're very grateful for @nikajukic's collaboration and submission of a test case to resolve this issue.

v8.2.0

• New Instrumentation for Tilt gem

  Template rendering using Tilt is now instrumented. See PR #847 for details.

• Configuration error_collector.ignore_errors is marked as deprecated

  This setting has been marked as deprecated in the documentation since version 7.2.0 and is now flagged as deprecated within the code.

• Remove Rails 2 instrumentation

  Though any version of Rails 2 has not been supported by the Ruby Agent since v3.18.1.330, instrumentation for ActionController and ActionWebService specific to that version were still part of the agent. This instrumentation has been removed.

• Remove duplicated settings from newrelic.yml

  Thank you @jakeonfire for bringing this to our attention and @kuroponzu for making the changes!

• Bugfix: Span Events recorded when using newrelic_ignore

  Previously, the agent was incorrectly recording span events only on transactions that should be ignored. This fix will prevent any span events from being created for transactions using newrelic_ignore, or ignored through the rules.ignore_url_regexes configuration option.

• Bugfix: Print deprecation warning for Cross-Application Tracing if enabled

  Prior to this change, the deprecation warning would log whenever the agent started up, regardless of configuration. Thank you @alpha-san for bringing this to our attention!

• Bugfix: Scrub non-unicode characters from DecoratingLogger

  To prevent JSON::GeneratorErrors, the DecoratingLogger replaces non-unicode characters with the replacement character: �. Thank you @jdelStrother for bringing this to our attention!

• Bugfix: Distributed tracing headers emitted errors when agent was not connected

  Previously, when the agent had not yet connected it would fail to create a trace context payload and emit an error, "TypeError: no implicit conversion of nil into String," to the agent logs. The correct behavior in this situation is to not create these headers due to the lack of required information. Now, the agent will not attempt to create trace context payloads until it has connected. Thank you @Izzette for bringing this to our attention!

v8.1.0

• Instrumentation for Ruby standard library Logger

  The agent will now automatically instrument Logger, recording number of lines and size of logging output, with breakdown by severity.

• Bugfix for Padrino instrumentation

  A bug was introduced to the way the agent installs padrino instrumentation in 7.0.0. This release fixes the issues with the padrino instrumentation. Thanks to @sriedel for bringing this issue to our attention.

• Bugfix: Stop deadlocks between New Relic thread and Delayed Job sampling thread

  Running the agent's polling queries for the DelayedJobSampler within the same ActiveRecord connection decreases the frequency of deadlocks in development environments. Thanks @jdelStrother for bringing this to our attention and providing excellent sample code to speed up development!

• Bugfix: Allow Net::HTTP request to IPv6 addresses

  The agent will no longer raise an URI::InvalidURIError error if an IPv6 address is passed to Net::HTTP. Thank you @tristinbarnett and @tabathadelane for crafting a solution!

• Bugfix: Allow integers to be passed to error_collector.ignore_status_codes configuration

  Integers not wrapped in quotation marks can be passed to error_collector.ignore_status_codes in the newrelic.yml file. Our thanks goes to @elaguerta and @brammerl for resolving this issue!

• Bugfix: Allow add_method_tracer to be used on BasicObjects

  Previously, our add_method_tracer changes referenced self.class which is not available on BasicObjects. This has been fixed. Thanks to @toncid for bringing this issue to our attention.

v8.0.0

• add_method_tracer refactored to use prepend over alias_method chaining

  This release overhauls the implementation of add_method_tracer, as detailed in issue #502. The main breaking updates are as follows:

  • A metric name passed to add_method_tracer will no longer be interpolated in an instance context as before. To maintain this behavior, pass a Proc object with the same arity as the method being traced. For example:

      # OLD
      add_method_tracer :foo, '#{args[0]}.#{args[1]}'
    
      # NEW
      add_method_tracer :foo, -> (*args) { "#{args[0]}.#{args[1]}" }

  • Similarly, the :code_header and :code_footer options to add_method_tracer will only accept a Proc object, which will be bound to the calling instance when the traced method is invoked.

  • Calling add_method_tracer for a method will overwrite any previously defined tracers for that method. To specify multiple metric names for a single method tracer, pass them to add_method_tracer as an array.

  See updated documentation on the following pages for full details:

  • Ruby Custom Instrumentation: Method Tracers
  • MethodTracer::ClassMethods#add_method_tracer

• Distributed tracing is enabled by default

  Distributed tracing tracks and observes service requests as they flow through distributed systems. Distributed tracing is now enabled by default and replaces cross application tracing.

• Bugfix: Incorrectly loading configuration options from newrelic.yml

  The agent will now import the configuration options error_collector.ignore_messages and error_collector.expected_messages from the newrelic.yml file correctly.

• Cross Application is now deprecated, and disabled by default

  Distributed tracing is replacing cross application tracing as the default means of tracing between services. To continue using it, enable it with cross_application_tracer.enabled: true and distributed_tracing.enabled: false

• Update configuration option default value for span_events.max_samples_stored from 1000 to 2000

  For more information about this configuration option, visit the Ruby agent documentation.

• Agent now enforces server supplied maximum value for configuration option span_events.max_samples_stored

  Upon connection to the New Relic servers, the agent will now enforce a maximum value allowed for the configuration option span_events.max_samples_stored sent from the New Relic servers.

• Remove Ruby 2.0 required kwarg compatibility checks

  Our agent has code that provides compatibility for required keyword arguments in Ruby versions below 2.1. Since the agent now only supports Ruby 2.2+, this code is no longer required.

• Replace Time.now with Process.clock_gettime

  Calls to Time.now have been replaced with calls to Process.clock_gettime to leverage the system's built-in clocks for elapsed time (Process::CLOCK_MONOTONIC) and wall-clock time (Process::CLOCK_REALTIME). This results in fewer object allocations, more accurate elapsed time records, and enhanced performance. Thanks to @sdemjanenko and @viraptor for advocating for this change!

• Updated generated default newrelic.yml

  Thank you @wyhaines and @creaturenex for your contribution. The default newrelic.yml that the agent can generate is now updated with commented out examples of all configuration options.

• Bugfix: Psych 4.0 causes errors when loading newrelic.yml

  Psych 4.0 now uses safe load behavior when using YAML.load which by default doesn't allow aliases, causing errors when the agent loads the config file. We have updated how we load the config file to avoid these errors.

• Remove support for Excon versions below 0.19.0

  Excon versions below 0.19.0 will no longer be instrumented through the Ruby agent.

• Remove support for Mongo versions below 2.1

  Mongo versions below 2.1 will no longer be instrumented through the Ruby agent.

• Remove tests for Rails 3.0 and Rails 3.1

  As of the 7.0 release, the Ruby agent stopped supporting Rails 3.0 and Rails 3.1. Despite this, we still had tests for these versions running on the agent's CI. Those tests are now removed.

• Update test Gemfiles for patched versions

  The gem has individual Gemfiles it uses to test against different common user setups. Rails 5.2, 6.0, and 6.1 have been updated to the latest patch versions in the test Gemfiles. Rack was updated in the Rails61 test suite to 2.1.4 to resolve a security vulnerability.

• Remove Merb Support

  This release removes the remaining support for the Merb framework. It merged with Rails during the 3.0 release. Now that the Ruby agent supports Rails 3.2 and above, we thought it was time to say goodbye.

• Remove deprecated method External.start_segment

  The method NewRelic::Agent::External.start_segment has been deprecated as of Ruby Agent 6.0.0. This method is now removed.

• Added testing and support for the following gem versions

  • activemerchant 1.121.0
  • bunny 2.19.0
  • excon 0.85.0
  • mongo 2.14.0, 2.15.1
  • padrino 0.15.1
  • resque 2.1.0
  • sequel 5.48.0
  • yajl-ruby 1.4.1

• This version adds support for ARM64/Graviton2 platform using Ruby 3.0.2+

v7.2.0

• Expected Errors and Ignore Errors This release adds support for configuration for expected/ignored errors by class name, status code, and message. The following configuration options are now available:

  • error_collector.ignore_classes
  • error_collector.ignore_messages
  • error_collector.ignore_status_codes
  • error_collector.expected_classes
  • error_collector.expected_messages
  • error_collector.expected_status_codes For more details about expected and ignored errors, please see our configuration documentation

• Bugfix: resolves "can't add a new key into hash during iteration" Errors

  Thanks to @wyhaines for this fix that prevents "can't add a new key into hash during iteration" errors from occurring when iterating over environment data.

• Bugfix: kwarg support fixed for Rack middleware instrumentation

  Thanks to @walro for submitting this fix. This fixes the rack instrumentation when using kwargs.

• Update known conflicts with use of Module#Prepend

  With our release of v7.0.0, we updated our instrumentation to use Module#Prepend by default, instead of method chaining. We have received reports of conflicts and added a check for these known conflicts. If a known conflict with prepend is detected while using the default value of 'auto' for gem instrumentation, the agent will instead install method chaining instrumentation in order to avoid this conflict. This check can be bypassed by setting the instrumentation method for the gem to 'prepend'.

v7.1.0

• Add support for CSP nonces when using our API to insert the browser agent

  We now support passing in a nonce to our API method browser_timing_header to allow the browser agent to run on applications using CSP nonces. This allows users to inject the browser agent themselves and use the nonce required for the script to run. In order to utilize this new feature, you must disable auto instrumentation for the browser agent, and use the API method browser_timing_header to pass the nonce in and inject the script manually.

• Removed MD5 use in the SQL sampler

  In order to allow the agent to run in FIPS compliant environments, the usage of MD5 for aggregating slow sql traces has been replaced with SHA1.

• Enable server-side configuration of distributed tracing

  distributed_tracing.enabled may now be set in server-side application configuration.

• Bugfix: Fix for missing part of a previous bugfix

  Our previous fix of "nil Middlewares injection now prevented and gracefully handled in Sinatra" released in 7.0.0 was partially overwritten by some of the other changes in that release. This release adds back those missing sections of the bugfix, and should resolve the issue for sinatra users.

• Update known conflicts with use of Module#Prepend

  With our release of v7.0.0, we updated our instrumentation to use Module#Prepend by default, instead of method chaining. We have received reports of conflicts and added a check for these known conflicts. If a known conflict with prepend is detected while using the default value of 'auto' for gem instrumentation, the agent will instead install method chaining instrumentation in order to avoid this conflict. This check can be bypassed by setting the instrumentation method for the gem to 'prepend'.

• Bugfix: Updated support for ActiveRecord 6.1+ instrumentation

  Previously, the agent depended on connection_id to be present in the Active Support instrumentation for sql.active_record to get the current ActiveRecord connection. As of Rails 6.1, connection_id has been dropped in favor of providing the connection object through the connection value exclusively. This resulted in datastore spans displaying fallback behavior, including showing "ActiveRecord" as the database vendor.

• Bugfix: Updated support for Resque's FORK_PER_JOB option

  Support for Resque's FORK_PER_JOB flag within the Ruby agent was incomplete and nonfunctional. The agent should now behave correctly when running in a non-forking Resque worker process.

• Bugfix: Added check for ruby2_keywords in add_transaction_tracer

  Thanks @beauraF for the contribution! Previously, the add_transaction_tracer was not updated when we added support for ruby 3. In order to correctly support **kwargs, ruby2_keywords was added to correctly update the method signature to use **kwargs in ruby versions that support that.

• Confirmed support for yajl 1.4.0

  Thanks to @creaturenex for the contribution! yajl-ruby 1.4.0 was added to our test suite and confirmed all tests pass, showing the agent supports this version as well.

v7.0.0

• Ruby Agent 6.x to 7.x Migration Guide Available

  Please see our Ruby Agent 6.x to 7.x migration guide for helpful strategies and tips for migrating from earlier versions of the Ruby agent to 7.0.0. We cover new configuration settings, diagnosing and installing SSL CA certificates and deprecated items and their replacements in this guide.

• Ruby 2.0 and 2.1 Dropped

  Support for Ruby 2.0 and 2.1 dropped with this release. No code changes that would prevent the agent from continuing to work with these releases are known. However, Rubies 2.0 and 2.1 are no longer included in our test matrices and are not supported for 7.0.0 and onward.

• Implemented prepend auto-instrumentation strategies for most Ruby gems/libraries

  This release brings the auto-instrumentation strategies for most gems into the modern era for Ruby by providing both prepend and method-chaining (a.k.a. method-aliasing) strategies for auto instrumenting. Prepend, which has been available since Ruby 2.0 is now the default strategy employed in auto-instrumenting. It is known that some external gems lead to Stack Level too Deep exceptions when prepend and method-chaining are mixed. In such known cases, auto-instrumenting strategy will fall back to method-chaining automatically.

  This release also deprecates many overlapping and inconsistently named configuration settings in favor of being able to control behavior of instrumentation per library with one setting that can be one of auto (the default), disabled, prepend, or chain.

  Please see the above-referenced migration guide for further details.

• Removed SSL cert bundle

  The agent will no longer ship this bundle and will rely on system certs.

• Removed deprecated config options

  The following config options were previously deprecated and are no longer available

  • disable_active_record_4
  • disable_active_record_5
  • autostart.blacklisted_constants
  • autostart.blacklisted_executables
  • autostart.blacklisted_rake_tasks
  • strip_exception_messages.whitelist

• Removed deprecated attribute

  The attribute httpResponseCode was previously deprecated and replaced with http.statusCode. This deprecated attribute has now been removed.

• Removed deprecated option in notice_error

  Previously, the :trace_only option to NewRelic::Agent.notice_error was deprecated and replaced with :expected. This deprecated option has been removed.

• Removed deprecated api methods

  Previously the api methods create_distributed_trace_payload and accept_distributed_trace_payload were deprecated. These have now been removed. Instead, please see insert_distributed_trace_headers and accept_distributed_trace_headers, respectively.

• Bugfix: Prevent browser monitoring middleware from installing to middleware multiple times

  In rare cases on jRuby, the BrowserMonitoring middleware could attempt to install itself multiple times at start-up. This bug fix addresses that by using a mutex to introduce thread safety to the operation. Sintra in particular can have this race condition because its middleware stack is not installed until the first request is received.

• Skip constructing Time for transactions

  Thanks to @viraptor, we are no longer constructing an unused Time object with every call to starting a new Transaction.

• Bugfix: nil Middlewares injection now prevented and gracefully handled in Sinatra

  Previously, the agent could potentially inject multiples of an instrumented middleware if Sinatra received many requests at once during start-up and initialization due to Sinatra's ability to delay full start-up as long as possible. This has now been fixed and the Ruby agent correctly instruments only once as well as gracefully handles nil middleware classes in general.

• Bugfix: Ensure transaction nesting max depth is always consistent with length of segments

  Thanks to @warp for noticing and fixing the scenario where Transaction nesting_max_depth can get out of sync with segments length resulting in an exception when attempting to nest the initial segment which does not exist.

v6.15.0

• Official Ruby 3.0 support

  The ruby agent has been verified to run on ruby 3.0.0

• Added support for Rails 6.1

  The ruby agent has been verified to run with Rails 6.1 Special thanks to @hasghari for setting this up!

• Added support for Sidekiq 6.0, 6.1

  The ruby agent has been verified to run with both 6.0 and 6.1 versions of sidekiq

• Bugfix: No longer overwrites sidekiq trace data

  Distributed tracing data is now added to the job trace info rather than overwriting the existing data.

• Bugfix: Fixes cases where errors are reported for spans with no other attributes

  Previously, in cases where a span does not have any agent/custom attributes on it, but an error is noticed and recorded against the span, a FrozenError: can't modify frozen Hash is thrown. This is now fixed and errors are now correctly recorded against such span events.

• Bugfix: DistributedTracing.insert_distributed_trace_headers Supportability metric now recorded

  Previously, API calls to DistributedTracing.insert_distributed_trace_headers would lead to an exception about the missing supportability metric rather than flowing through the API implementation as intended. This would potentially lead to broken distributed traces as the trace headers were not inserted on the API call. DistributedTracing.insert_distributed_trace_headers now correctly records the supportability metric and inserts the distributed trace headers as intended.

• Bugfix: child completions after parent completes sometimes throws exception attempting to access nil parent

  In scenarios where the child segment/span is completing after the parent in jRuby, the parent may have already been freed and no longer accessible. This would lead to an attempt to call descendant_complete on a Nil object. This is fixed to protect against calling the descendant_complete in such cases.

• Feature: implements force_install_exit_handler config flag

  The force_install_exit_handler configuration flag allows an application to instruct the agent to install its graceful shutdown exit handler, which will send any locally cached data to the New Relic collector prior to the application shutting down. This is useful for when the primary framework has an embedded Sinatra application that is otherwise detected and skips installing the exit hook for graceful shutdowns.

• Default prepend_net_instrumentation to false

  Previously, prepend_net_instrumentation defaulted to true. However, many gems are still using monkey patching on Net::HTTP, which causes compatibility issues with using prepend. Defaulting this to false minimizes instances of unexpected compatibility issues.

v6.14.0

• Bugfix: Method tracers no longer cloning arguments

  Previously, when calling add_method_tracer with certain combination of arguments, it would lead to the wrapped method's arguments being cloned rather than passed to the original method for manipulation as intended. This has been fixed.

• Bugfix: Delayed Job instrumentation fixed for Ruby 2.7+

  Previously, the agent was erroneously separating positional and keyword arguments on the instrumented method calls into Delayed Job's library. The led to Delayed job not auto-instrumenting correctly and has been fixed.

• Bugfix: Ruby 2.7+ methods sometimes erroneously attributed compiler warnings to the Agent's add_method_tracer

  The specific edge cases presented are now fixed by this release of the agent. There are still some known corner-cases that will be resolved with upcoming changes in next major release of the Agent. If you encounter a problem with adding method tracers and compiler warnings raised, please continue to submit small reproducible examples.

• Bugfix: Ruby 2.7+ fix for keyword arguments on Rack apps is unnecessary and removed

  A common fix for positional and keyword arguments for method parameters was implemented where it was not needed and led to RackApps getting extra arguments converted to keyword arguments rather than Hash when it expected one. This Ruby 2.7+ change was reverted so that Rack apps behave correctly for Ruby >= 2.7.

• Feature: captures incoming and outgoing request headers for distributed tracing

  HTTP request headers will be logged when log level is at least debug level. Similarly, request headers for exchanges with New Relic servers are now audit logged when audit logging is enabled.

• Bugfix: newrelic.yml.erb added to the configuration search path

  Previously, when a user specifies a newrelic.yml.erb and no newrelic.yml file, the agent fails to find the .erb file because it was not in the list of files searched at startup. The Ruby agent has long supported this as a means of configuring the agent programmatically. The newrelic.yml.erb filename is restored to the search path and will be utilized if present. NOTE: newrelic.yml still takes precedence over newrelic.yml.erb If found, the .yml file is used instead of the .erb file. Search directories and order of traversal remain unchanged.

• Bugfix: dependency detection of Redis now works without raising an exception

  Previously, when detecting if Redis was available to instrument, the dependency detection would fail with an Exception raised (with side effect of not attempting to instrument Redis). This is now fixed with a better dependency check that resolves falsely without raising an Exception.

• Bugfix: Gracefully handles NilClass as a Middleware Class when instrumenting

  Previously, if a NilClass is passed as the Middleware Class to instrument when processing the middleware stack, the agent would fail to fully load and instrument the middleware stack. This fix gracefully skips over nil classes.

• Memory Sampler updated to recognize macOS Big Sur

  Previously, the agent was unable to recognize the platform macOS Big Sur in the memory sampler, resulting in an error being logged. The memory sampler is now able to recognize Big Sur.

• Prepend implementation of Net::HTTP instrumentation available

  There is now a config option (prepend_net_instrumentation) that will enable the agent to use prepend while instrumenting Net::HTTP. This option is set to true by default.

v6.13.1

• Bugfix: obfuscating URLs to external services no longer modifying original URI

  A recent change to the Ruby agent to obfuscate URIs sent to external services had the unintended side-effect of removing query parameters from the original URI. This is fixed to obfuscate while also preserving the original URI.

  Thanks to @VictorJimenezKwast for pinpointing and helpful unit test to demonstrate.

v6.13.0

• Bugfix: never use redirect host when accessing preconnect endpoint

  When connecting to New Relic, the Ruby Agent uses the value in Agent.config[:host] to post a request to the New Relic preconnect endpoint. This endpoint returns a "redirect host" which is the URL to which agents send data from that point on.

  Previously, if the agent needed to reconnect to the collector, it would incorrectly use this redirect host to call the preconnect endpoint, when it should have used the original configured value in Agent.config[:host]. The agent now uses the correct host for all calls to preconnect.

• Bugfix: calling add_custom_attributes no longer modifies the params of the caller

  The previous agent's improvements to recording attributes at the span level had an unexpected side-effect of modifying the params passed to the API call as duplicated attributes were deleted in the process. This is now fixed and params passed in are no longer modified.

  Thanks to Pete Johns (@johnsyweb) for the PR that resolves this bug.

• Bugfix: http.url query parameters spans are now obfuscated

  Previously, the agent was recording the full URL of the external requests, including the query and fragment parts of the URL as part of the attributes on the external request span. This has been fixed so that the URL is obfuscated to filter out potentially sensitive data.

• Use system SSL certificates by default

  The Ruby agent previously used a root SSL/TLS certificate bundle by default. Now the agent will attempt to use the default system certificates, but will fall back to the bundled certs if there is an issue (and log that this occurred).

• Bugfix: reduce allocations for segment attributes

  Previously, every segment received an Attributes object on initialization. The agent now lazily creates attributes on segments, resulting in a significant reduction in object allocations for a typical transaction.

• Bugfix: eliminate errors around Rake::VERSION with Rails

  When running a Rails application with rake tasks, customers could see the following error:

• Prevent connecting agent thread from hanging on shutdown

  A bug in Net::HTTP's Gzip decoder can cause the (un-catchable) thread-kill exception to be replaced with a (catchable) Zlib exception, which prevents a connecting agent thread from exiting during shutdown, causing the Ruby process to hang indefinitely. This workaround checks for an aborting thread in the #connect exception handler and re-raises the exception, allowing a killed thread to continue exiting.

  Thanks to Will Jordan (@wjordan) for chasing this one down and patching with tests.

• Fix error messages about Rake instrumentation

  When running a Rails application with rake tasks, customers could see the following error in logs resulting from a small part of rake functionality being loaded with the Rails test runner:

  ERROR : Error while detecting rake_instrumentation:
  ERROR : NameError: uninitialized constant Rake::VERSION
  

  Such error messages should no longer appear in this context.

  Thanks to @CamilleDrapier for pointing out this issue.

• Remove NewRelic::Metrics

  The NewRelic::Metrics module has been removed from the agent since it is no longer used.

  Thanks to @csaura for the contribution!

v6.12.0

• The New Relic Ruby Agent is now open source under the Apache 2 license and you can now observe the issues we're working on. See our Contributing guide and Code of Conduct for details on contributing!

• Security: Updated all uses of Rake to >= 12.3.3

  All versions of Rake testing prior to 12.3.3 were removed to address CVE-2020-8130. No functionality in the agent was removed nor deprecated with this change, and older versions of rake are expected to continue to work as they have in the past. However, versions of rake < 12.3.3 are no longer tested nor supported.

• Bugfix: fixes an error capturing content length in middleware on multi-part responses

  In the middleware tracing, the Content-Length header is sometimes returned as an array of values when content is a multi-part response. Previously, the agent would fail with "NoMethodError: undefined method to_i for Array" Error. This bug is now fixed and multi-part content lengths are summed for a total when an Array is present.

• Added support for auto-instrumenting Mongo gem versions 2.6 to 2.12

• Bugfix: MongoDB instrumentation did not handle CommandFailed events when noticing errors

  The mongo gem sometimes returns a CommandFailed object instead of a CommandSucceeded object with error attributes populated. The instrumentation did not handle noticing errors on CommandFailed objects and resulted in logging an error and backtrace to the log file.

  Additionally, a bug in recording the metric for "findAndModify" as all lowercased "findandmodify" for versions 2.1 through 2.5 was fixed.

• Bugfix: Priority Sampler causes crash in high throughput environments in rare cases

  Previously, the priority sampling buffer would, in rare cases, generate an error in high-throughput environments once capacity is reached and the sampling algorithm engages. This issue is fixed.

• Additional Transaction Information applied to Span Events

  When Distributed Tracing and/or Infinite Tracing are enabled, the agent will now incorporate additional information from the Transaction Event on to the root Span Event of the transaction.

  The following items are affected:

  • Custom attribute values applied to the Transaction via our add_custom_attributes API method.
  • Request parameters: request.parameters.*
  • Request headers: request.headers.*
  • Response headers: response.headers.*
  • Resque job arguments: job.resque.args.*
  • Sidekiq job arguments: job.sidekiq.args.*
  • Messaging arguments: message.*
  • httpResponseCode (deprecated in this version; see note below)/http.statusCode
  • response.status
  • request.uri
  • request.method
  • host.displayName

• Security Recommendation

  Review your Transaction attributes include and exclude configurations. Any attribute include or exclude settings specific to Transaction Events should be applied to your Span attributes include and exclude configuration or your global attributes include and exclude configuration.

• Agent attribute deprecation: httpResponseCode

  Starting in this agent version, the agent attribute httpResponseCode (string value) has been deprecated. Customers can begin using http.statusCode (integer value) immediately, and httpResponseCode will be removed in the agent's next major version update.

• Bugfix: Eliminate warnings for distributed tracing when using sidekiq

  Previously, using sidekiq with distributed tracing disabled resulted in warning messages
  WARN : Not configured to accept distributed trace headers
WARN : Not configured to insert distributed trace headers
  These messages no longer appear.

v6.11.0

• Infinite Tracing

  This release adds support for Infinite Tracing. Infinite Tracing observes 100% of your distributed traces and provides visualizations for the most actionable data. With Infinite Tracing, you get examples of errors and long-running traces so you can better diagnose and troubleshoot your systems.

  Configure your agent to send traces to a trace observer in New Relic Edge. View distributed traces through New Relic’s UI. There is no need to install a collector on your network.

  Infinite Tracing is currently available on a sign-up basis. If you would like to participate, please contact your sales representative.

• Bugfix: Cross Application Tracing (CAT) adds a missing field to response

  Previously, the Ruby agent's Cross Application Tracing header was missing a reserved field that would lead to an error in the Go agent's processing of incoming headers from the Ruby agent. This fix adds that missing field to the headers, eliminating the issue with traces involving the Ruby agent and the Go agent.

• Bugfix: Environment Report now supports Rails >= 6.1

  Previously, users of Rails 6.1 would see the following deprecation warning appear when the Ruby agent attempted to collect enviroment data: DEPRECATION WARNING: [] is deprecated and will be removed from Rails 6.2. These deprecation methods no longer appear.

  Thanks to Sébastien Dubois (sedubois) for reporting this issue and for the contribution!

• Added distributed tracing to Sidekiq jobs

  Previously, Sidekiq jobs were not included in portions of distributed traces captured by the Ruby agent. Now you can view distributed traces that include Sidekiq jobs instrumented by the Ruby agent.

  Thanks to andreaseger for the contribution!

• Bugfix: Eliminate warnings appearing when using add_method_tracer with Ruby 2.7

  Previously, using add_method_tracer with Ruby 2.7 to trace a method that included keyword arguments resulted in warning messages: warning: Using the last argument as keyword parameters is deprecated; maybe ** should be added to the call. These messages no longer appear.

  Thanks to Harm de Wit and Atsuo Fukaya for reporting the issue!

v6.10.0

• Error attributes now added to each span that exits with an error or exception

  Error attributes error.class and error.message are now included on the span event in which an error or exception was noticed, and, in the case of unhandled exceptions, on any ancestor spans that also exit with an error. The public API method notice_error now attaches these error attributes to the currently executing span.

  Spans with error details are now highlighted red in the Distributed Tracing UI, and error details will expose the associated error.class and error.message. It is also now possible to see when an exception leaves the boundary of the span, and if it is caught in an ancestor span without reaching the entry span. NOTE: This “bubbling up” of exceptions will impact the error count when compared to prior behavior for the same trace. It is possible to have a trace that now has span errors without the trace level showing an error.

  If multiple errors occur on the same span, only the most recent error information is added to the attributes. Prior errors on the same span are overwritten.

  These span event attributes conform to ignored errors and expected errors.

• Added tests for latest Grape / Rack combination

  For a short period of time, the latest versions of Grape and Rack had compatibility issues. Generally, Rack 2.1.0 should be avoided in all cases due to breaking changes in many gems reliant on Rack. We recommend using either Rack <= 2.0.9, or using latest Rack when using Grape (2.2.2 at the time of this writing).

• Bugfix: Calculate Content-Length in bytes

  Previously, the Content-Length HTTP header would be incorrect after injecting the Browser Monitoring JS when the response contained Unicode characters because the value was not calculated in bytes. The Content-Length is now correctly updated.

  Thanks to thaim for the contribution!

• Bugfix: Fix Content-Length calculation when response is nil

  Previously, calculating the Content-Length HTTP header would result in a NoMethodError in the case of a nil response. These errors will no longer occur in such a case.

  Thanks to Johan Van Ryseghem for the contribution!

• Bugfix: DecoratingFormatter now logs timestamps as millisecond Integers

  Previously the agent sent timestamps as a Float with milliseconds as part of the fractional value. Logs in Context was changed to only accept Integer values and this release changes DecoratingFormatter to match.

• Added --force option to newrelic install cli command to allow overwriting newrelic.yml

• Bugfix: The fully qualified hostname now works correctly for BSD and Solaris

  Previously, when running on systems such as BSD and Solaris, the agent was unable to determine the fully qualified domain name, which is used to help link Ruby agent data with data from New Relic Infrastructure. This information is now successfully collected on various BSD distros and Solaris.

v6.9.0

• Added support for W3C Trace Context, with easy upgrade from New Relic trace context

  • Distributed Tracing now supports W3C Trace Context headers for HTTP protocols when distributed tracing is enabled. Our implementation can accept and emit both the W3C trace header format and the New Relic trace header format. This simplifies agent upgrades, allowing trace context to be propagated between services with older and newer releases of New Relic agents. W3C trace header format will always be accepted and emitted. New Relic trace header format will be accepted, and you can optionally disable emission of the New Relic trace header format.

  • When distributed tracing is enabled by setting distributed_tracing.enabled to true, the Ruby agent will now accept W3C's traceparent and tracestate headers when calling DistributedTracing.accept_distributed_trace_headers or automatically via http instrumentation. When calling DistributedTracing.insert_distributed_trace_headers, or automatically via http instrumentation, the Ruby agent will include the W3C headers along with the New Relic distributed tracing header, unless the New Relic trace header format is disabled by setting exclude_newrelic_header setting to true.

  • Added DistributedTracing.accept_distributed_trace_headers API for accepting both New Relic and W3C TraceContext distributed traces.

  • Deprecated DistributedTracing.accept_distributed_trace_payload which will be removed in a future major release.

  • Added DistributedTracing.insert_distributed_trace_headers API for adding outbound distributed trace headers. Both W3C TraceContext and New Relic formats will be included unless distributed_tracing.exclude_newrelic_header: true.

  • Deprecated DistributedTracing.create_distributed_trace_payload which will be removed in a future major release.

  Known Issues and Workarounds

  • If a .NET agent is initiating traces as the root service, do not upgrade your downstream Ruby New Relic agents to this agent release.

• Official Ruby 2.7 support

  The Ruby agent has been verified to run with Ruby 2.7.0.

• Reduced allocations when tracing transactions using API calls

  Default empty hashes for options parameter were not frozen, leading to excessive and unnecessary allocations when calling APIs for tracing transactions.

  Thanks to Joel Turkel (jturkel) for the contribution!

• Bugfix for Resque worker thread race conditions

  Recent changes in Rack surfaced issues marshalling data for resque, surfaced a potential race-condition with closing out the worker-threads before flushing the data pipe. This is now fixed.

  Thanks to Bertrand Paquet (bpaquet) for the contribution!

• Bugfix for Content-Length when injecting Browser Monitoring JS

  The Content-Length HTTP header would be incorrect after injecting the Browser Monitoring JS into the HEAD tag of the HTML source with Content-Length and lead to the HTML BODY content being truncated in some cases. The Content-Length is now correctly updated after injecting the Browser Monitoring JS script.

  Thanks to Slava Kardakov (ojab) for the contribution!

v6.8.0

• Initial Ruby 2.7 support

  The Ruby agent has been verified to run with Ruby 2.7.0-preview1.

• New API method to add custom attributes to Spans

  New API method for adding custom attributes to spans. Previously, custom attributes were only available at the Transaction level. Now, with Span level custom attributes, more granular tagging of events is possible for easier isolation and review of trace events. For more information:

  • Agent#add_custom_span_attributes

• Enables ability to migrate to Configurable Security Policies (CSP) on a per agent basis for accounts already using High Security Mode (HSM).

  When both HSM and CSP are enabled for an account, an agent (this version or later) can successfully connect with either high_security: true or the appropriate security_policies_token configured. high_security has been added as part of the preconnect payload.

• Bugfix for Logs in Context combined with act-fluent-logger-rails

  Previously, when using the Ruby agent's Logs in Context logger to link logging data with trace and entity metadata for an improved experience in the UI, customers who were also using the act-fluent-logger-rails gem would see a NoMethodError for clear_tags! that would interfere with the use of this feature. This error no longer appears, allowing customers to combine the use of Logs in Context with the use of this gem.

  Please note that the Logs in Context logger does not support tagged logging; if you are initializing your logger with a log_tags argument, your custom tags may not appear on the final version of your logs.

• Bugfix for parsing invalid newrelic.yml

  Previously, if the newrelic.yml configuration file was invalid, and the agent could not start as a result, the agent would not log any indication of the problem.

  This version of the agent will emit a FATAL message to STDOUT when this scenario occurs so that customers can address issues with newrelic.yml that prevent startup.

• Configuration options containing the terms "whitelist" and "blacklist" deprecated

  The following local configuration settings have been deprecated:

  • autostart.blacklisted_constants: use autostart.denylisted_constants instead.
  • autostart.blacklisted_executables: use autostart.denylisted_executables instead.
  • autostart.blacklisted_rake_tasks: use autostart.denylisted_rake_tasks instead.
  • strip_exception_messages.whitelist: use strip_exception_messages.allowed_classes instead.

• Bugfix for module loading and constant resolution in Rails

  Starting in version 6.3, the Ruby agent has caused module loading and constant resolution to sometimes fail, which caused errors in some Rails applications. These errors were generally NoMethodError exceptions or I18n errors translation missing or invalid locale. These errors would not appear if the agent was removed from the application's Gemfile. This version of the agent fixes these issues with module loading and constant resolution, so these errors no longer occur.

• Bugfix: failed to get urandom

  Previous versions of the agent would fail unexpectedly when the Ruby process used every available file descriptor. The failures would include this message:

  ERROR : RuntimeError: failed to get urandom
  

  This version of the agent uses a different strategy for generating random IDs, and will not fail in the same way when no file descriptors are available.

v6.7.0

• Trace and Entity Metadata API

  Several new API methods have been added to the agent:

  • Agent#linking_metadata
  • Tracer#trace_id
  • Tracer#span_id
  • Tracer#sampled?

  These API methods allow you to access information that can be used to link data of your choosing to a trace or entity.

• Logs in Context

  This version of the agent includes a logger, which can be used in place of ::Logger from the standard library, or ActiveSupport::Logger from Rails. This logger leverages the new trace and entity metadata API to decorate log statements with entity and trace metadata, so they can be correlated together in the New Relic UI.

  For more information on how to use logs in context, see https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/enable-logs-context-ruby

• Project metadata in Gemspec

  Project metadata has been added to the gemspec file. This means our Rubygems page will allow users to more easily access the agent's source code, raise issues, and read the changelog.

  Thanks to Orien Madgwick for the contribution!

v6.6.0

• Bugfix for ActionCable Instrumentation

  Previous versions of the agent sometimes caused application crashes with some versions of ActionCable. The application would exit quickly after startup with the error: uninitialized constant ActionCable::Engine.

  Version 6.6.0 of the agent no longer crashes in this way.

• Handling of disabling Error Collection

  When the agent first starts, it begins collecting Error Events and Traces before fetching configuration from New Relic. In previous versions of the agent, those events or traces would be sent to New Relic, even if Error Collection is disabled in the application's server-side configuration.

  Version 6.6.0 of the agent drops all collected Error Events and Traces if the configuration from the server disables Error Collection.

v6.5.0

• Change to default setting for ActiveRecord connection resolution

  Due to incompatibilities between the faster ActiveRecord connection resolution released in v6.3.0 of the agent and other gems which patch ActiveRecord, backport_fast_active_record_connection_lookup will now be set to false by default. Because it results in a significant performance improvement, we recommend customers whose environments include ActiveRecord change this setting to true unless they are using other gems which measure ActiveRecord performance, which may lose functionality when combined with this setting. If unsure whether to enable backport_fast_active_record_connection_lookup, we recommend enabling it in a development environment to make sure other gems which patch ActiveRecord are still working as expected.

• Bugfix for ActiveStorage instrumentation error

  Version 6.4.0 of the agent introduced a bug that interfered with ActiveStorage callbacks, resulting in the agent being unable to instrument ActiveStorage operations. ActiveStorage segments are now correctly recorded.

• Bugfix for ActiveRecord 4.1 and 4.2 exception logging

  Version 6.3.0 of the agent introduced a bug that prevented ActiveRecord versions 4.1 and 4.2 from logging exceptions that occurred within a database transaction. This version of the agent restores the exception logging functionality from previous agent versions. Thanks to Oleksiy Kovyrin for the contribution!

v6.4.0

• Custom Metadata Collection

  The agent now collects environment variables prefixed by NEW_RELIC_METADATA_. These may be added to transaction events to provide context between your Kubernetes cluster and your services. For details on the behavior, see this blog post.

• Bugfix for faster ActiveRecord connection resolution

  Version 6.3.0 of the agent backported the faster ActiveRecord connection resolution from Rails 6.0 to previous versions, but the implementation caused certain other gems which measured ActiveRecord performance to stop working. This version of the agent changes the implementation of this performance improvement so no such conflicts occur.

• Bugfix for Grape instrumentation error

  Previous versions of the agent would fail to install Grape instrumentation in Grape versions 1.2.0 and up if the API being instrumented subclassed Grape::API::Instance rather than Grape::API. A warning would also print to the newrelic_agent log:

  WARN : Error in Grape instrumentation
  WARN : NoMethodError: undefined method `name' for nil:NilClass
  

  This version of the agent successfully installs instrumentation for subclasses of Grape::API::Instance, and these log messages should no longer appear.

• Bugfix for streaming responses

  Previous versions of the agent would attempt to insert JavaScript instrumentation into any streaming response that did not make use of ActionController::Live. This resulted in an empty, non-streamed response being sent to the client.

  This version of the agent will not attempt to insert JavaScript instrumentation into a response which includes the header Transfer-Encoding=chunked, which indicates a streaming response.

  This should exclude JavaScript instrumentation for all streamed responses. To include this instrumentation manually, see Manually instrument via agent API in our documentation.

v6.3.0

• Official Rails 6.0 support

  This version of the agent has been verified against the Rails 6.0.0 release.

  As ActiveRecord 4, 5, and 6 use the same New Relic instrumentation, the disable_active_record_4 and disable_active_record_5 settings in NewRelic.yml are being deprecated in favor of the new disable_active_record_notifications. This new setting will affect the instrumentation of ActiveRecord 4, 5, and 6. The deprecated settings will be removed in a future release.

• Bugfix for newrelic deployments script

  For applications housed in the EU, the newrelic deployments script included with previous versions of the agent would fail with the following message: Deployment not recorded: Application does not exist. This is because the script would attempt to send the deployment notification to the US region. The deployment script now sends deployments to the correct region.

• Faster ActiveRecord connection resolution

  This version of the agent uses the faster ActiveRecord connection resolution that Rails 6.0 uses, even on previous versions of Rails. Thanks to Callum Jones for the contribution!

• Support non-ascii characters in hostnames

  Previous versions of the agent would frequently log warnings like: log writing failed. "\xE2" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 if the hostname contained a non-ascii character. This version of the agent will no longer log these warnings. Thanks to Rafael Petry for the contribution!

v6.2.0

• Bugfix for superfluous Empty JSON response error messages

  Version 6.1.0 of the agent frequently logged error messages about an empty JSON response, when no error had occurred. These logs no longer appear.

• Bugfix for Unable to calculate elapsed transaction time warning messages

  Ruby Agent versions 5.4 through 6.1, when running in jruby without ObjectSpace enabled, would occasionally log a warning indicating that the agent was unable to calculate the elapsed transaction time. When this log statement appeared, the affected transactions would not be included in the data displayed on the capacity analysis page. These transactions are now correctly recorded.

v6.1.0

• Performance monitoring on Kubernetes

  This release adds Transaction event attributes that provide context between your Kubernetes cluster and services. For details on the benefits, see this blog post.

• Bugfix for Bunny instrumentation when popping empty queues

  When a customer calls Bunny::Queue#pop on an empty queue, Bunny returns a nil value. Previous Ruby Agent versions raised a NoMethodError when trying to process this result. Now, the agent correctly skips processing for nil values. Thanks to Matt Campbell for the contribution.

v6.0.0

• Tracer API for flexible custom instrumentation

  With agent version 6.0, we are introducing the Tracer class, an officially supported public API for more flexible custom instrumentation. By calling its in_transaction method, you can instrument an arbitrary section of Ruby code without needing to juggle any explicit state. Behind the scenes, the agent will make sure that the measured code results in an APM segment inside a transaction.

  The same API contains additional methods for creating transactions and segments, and for interacting with the current transaction. For more details, see the custom instrumentation documentation.

  If you were previously using any of the agent's private, undocumented APIs, such as Transaction.wrap or Transaction.start/stop, you will need to update your code to use the Tracer API.

  The full list of APIs that were removed or deprecated are:

  • External.start_segment
  • Transaction.create_segment
  • Transaction.start
  • Transaction.stop
  • Transaction.start_datastore_segment
  • Transaction.start_segment
  • Transaction.wrap
  • TransactionState.current_transaction

  If are you using any of these APIs, please see the upgrade guide for a list of replacements.

• Agent detects Rails 6.0

  The agent properly detects Rails 6.0 and no longer logs an error when started in a Rails 6.0 environment. This does not include full Rails 6.0 support, which will be coming in a future release. Thanks to Jacob Bednarz for the contribution.

v5.7.0

• Ruby 2.6 support

  We have tested the agent with the official release of Ruby 2.6.0 made on December 25, 2018, and it looks great! Feel free to use agent v5.7 to measure the performance of your Ruby 2.6 applications.

• Support for loading Sequel core standalone

  Earlier versions of the agent required users of the Sequel data mapping library to load the entire library. The agent will now enable Sequel instrumentation when an application loads Sequel's core standalone; i.e., without the Sequel::Model class. Thanks to Vasily Kolesnikov for the contribution!

• Grape 1.2 support

  With agent versions 5.6 and earlier, Grape 1.2 apps reported their transactions under the name Proc#call instead of the name of the API endpoint. Starting with agent version 5.7, all existing versions of Grape will report the correct transaction name. Thanks to Masato Ohba for the contribution!

v5.6.0

• Bugfix for transactions with ActionController::Live

  Previously, transactions containing ActionController::Live resulted in incorrect calculations of capacity analysis as well as error backtraces appearing in agent logs in agent versions 5.4 and later. The agent now correctly calculates capacity for transactions with ActionController::Live.

• Add ability to exclude attributes from span events and transaction segments

  Agent versions 5.5 and lower could selectively exclude attributes from page views, error traces, transaction traces, and transaction events. With agent version 5.6 and higher, you can also exclude attributes from span events (via the span_events.include/exclude options) and from transaction segments (via the transaction_segments.include/exclude options).

  As with other attribute destinations, these new options will inherit values from the top-level attributes.include/exclude settings. See the documentation for more information.

• Increasing backoff sequence on failing to connect to New Relic

  If the agent cannot reach New Relic, it will now wait for an increasing amount of time after each failed attempt. We are also starting with a shorter delay initially, which will help customer apps bounce back more quickly from transient network errors.

• Truncation of long stack traces

  Previous versions of the agent would truncate long stack traces to 50 frames. To give customers more flexibility, we have added the error_collector.max_backtrace_frames configuration option. Thanks to Patrick Tulskie for the contribution!

• Update link in documentation

  The community forum link in README.md now goes to the updated location. Thanks to Sam Killgallon for the contribution!

• Active Storage instrumentation

  The agent now provides instrumentation for Active Storage, introduced in Rails 5.2. Customers will see Active Storage operations represented as segments within transaction traces.

v5.5.0

• Bugfix for perform instrumentation with curb gem

  Use of curb's perform method now no longer results in nil headers getting returned.

• Bugfix for parsing Docker container IDs

  The agent now parses Docker container IDs correctly regardless of the cgroup parent.

• Use lazy load hooks for ActiveJob instrumentation

  In some instances the ActiveJob instrumentation could trigger ActiveJob to load before it was initialized by Rails. This could result in configuration changes not being properly applied. The agent now uses lazy load hooks which fixes this issue.

• Documentation improvement

  The config.dot diagram of the agent's configuration settings no longer includes the deleted developer_mode option. Thanks to Yuichiro Kaneko for the contribution!

v5.4.0

• Capacity analysis for multi-threaded dispatchers

  Metrics around capacity analysis did not previously account for multi-threaded dispatchers, and consequently could result in capacities of over 100% being recorded. This version now properly accounts for multi-threaded dispatchers.

• NewRelic::Agent.disable_transaction_tracing deprecated

  NewRelic::Agent.disable_transaction_tracing has been deprecated. Users are encouraged to use NewRelic::Agent.disable_all_tracing or NewRelic::Agent.ignore_transaction instead.

• Bugfix for SQL over-obfuscation

  A bug, introduced in v5.3.0, where SQL could be over-obfuscated for some database adapters has been fixed.

• Bugfix for span event data in Resque processes

  A bug where span events would not be sent from Resque processes due to a missing endpoint has been fixed.

v5.3.0

• Distributed Tracing

  Distributed tracing lets you see the path that a request takes as it travels through your distributed system. By showing the distributed activity through a unified view, you can troubleshoot and understand a complex system better than ever before.

  Distributed tracing is available with an APM Pro or equivalent subscription. To see a complete distributed trace, you need to enable the feature on a set of neighboring services. Enabling distributed tracing changes the behavior of some New Relic features, so carefully consult the transition guide before you enable this feature.

  To enable distributed tracing, set the distributed_tracing.enabled configuration option to true.

v5.2.0

• Use priority sampling for errors and custom events

  Priority sampling replaces the older reservoir event sampling method. With this change, the agent will maintain randomness across a given time period while improving coordination among transactions, errors, and custom events.

• Bugfix for wrapping datastore operations

  The agent will now complete the process of wrapping datastore operations even if an error occurs during execution of a callback.

• Span Events

  Finished segments whose sampled property is true will now post Span events to Insights.

v5.1.0

• Rails 5.2 support

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

• Support for newer libraries and frameworks

  We have updated the multiverse suite to test the agent against current versions of several frameworks.

• Add custom_attributes.enabled configuration option

  This option is enabled by default. When it's disabled, custom attributes will not be transmitted on transaction events or error events.

• Fix Grape load order dependency

  The agent will now choose the correct name for Grape transactions even if the customer's app loads the agent before Grape. Thanks to Daniel Doubrovkine for the contribution!

• Add webpacker:compile to blacklisted tasks

  webpacker:compile is commonly used for compiling assets. It has been added to AUTOSTART_BLACKLISTED_RAKE_TASKS in the default configuration. Thanks to Claudio B. for the contribution!

• Make browser instrumentation W3C-compliant

  type="text/javascript" is optional for the <script> tag under W3C. The type attribute has now been removed from browser instrumentation. Thanks to Spharian for the contribution!

• Deferred add_method_tracer calls

  If a third-party library calls add_method_tracer before the agent has finished starting, we now queue these calls and run them when it's safe to do so (rather than skipping them and logging a warning).

• Bugfix for Resque around / before hooks

  In rare cases, the agent was not instrumenting Resque around and before hooks. This version fixes the error.

• Truncation of long stack traces

  Occasionally, long stack traces would cause complications sending data to New Relic. This version truncates long traces to 50 frames (split evenly between the top and bottom of the trace).

v5.0.0

• SSL connections to New Relic are now mandatory

  Prior to this version, using an SSL connection to New Relic was the default behavior, but could be overridden. SSL connections are now enforced (not overridable).

• Additional security checking before trying to explain multi-statement SQL queries

  Customer applications might submit SQL queries containing multiple statements (e.g., SELECT _ FROM table; SELECT _ FROM table). For security reasons, we should not generate explain plans in this situation.

  Although the agent correctly skipped explain plans for these queries during testing, we have added extra checks for this scenario.

• Bugfix for RabbitMQ exchange names that are symbols

  The agent no longer raises a TypeError when a RabbitMQ exchange name is a Ruby symbol instead of a string.

• Bugfix for audit logging to stdout

  Previous agents configured to log to stdout would correctly send regular agent logs to stdout, but would incorrectly send audit logs to a text file named "stdout". This release corrects the error.

• Bugfix for Capistrano deployment notifications on v3.7 and beyond

  Starting with version 3.7, Capistrano uses a different technique to determine a project's version control system. The agent now works correctly with this new behavior. Thanks to Jimmy Zhang for the contribution.

v4.8.0

• Initialize New Relic Agent before config initializers

When running in a Rails environment, the agent registers an initializer that starts the agent. This initializer is now defined to run before config/initializers. Previously, the ordering was not specified for the initializer. This change guarantees the agent will started by the time your initializers run, so you can safely reference the Agent in your custom initializers. Thanks to Tony Ta for the contribution.

• Ruby 2.5 Support

The Ruby Agent has been verified to run under Ruby 2.5.

• request.uri Collected as an Agent Attribute

Users can now control the collection of request.uri on errors and transaction traces. Previously it was always collected without the ability to turn it off. It is now an agent attribute that can be controlled via the attributes config. For more information on agent attributes see here.

4.7.1

• 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.

v4.7.0

• 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.

v4.6.0

• 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 this new functionality.

v4.5.0

• 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 initialize 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.

v4.4.0

• 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/node/2601.

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.

v3.18.1

• Ensure Mongo aggregate queries are properly obfuscated

Instrumentation for the Mongo 2.x driver had a bug where the pipeline attribute of Mongo aggregate queries was not properly obfuscated. Users who have sensitive data in their aggregate queries are strongly encouraged to upgrade to this version of the agent. Users who are unable to upgrade are encouraged to turn off query collection using by setting mongo.capture_queries to false in their newrelic.yml files.

This release fixes New Relic Security Bulletin NR17-03.

• Early access Redis 4.0 instrumentation

Our Redis instrumentation has been tested against Redis 4.0.0.rc1.

v3.18.0

• Ruby 2.4.0 support

The agent is now tested against the official release of ruby 2.4.0, excluding incompatible packages.

• Agent-based metrics will not be recorded outside of active transactions

The agent has historically recorded metrics outside of a transaction. In practice, this usually occurs in applications that run background job processors. The agent would record metrics for queries the background job processor is making between transactions. This can lead to display issues on the background overview page and the presence of metrics generated by the background job processor can mask the application generated metrics on the database page. The agent will no longer generate metrics outside of a transaction. Custom metrics recorded using NewRelic::Agent.record_metric will continue to be recorded regardless of whether there is an active transaction.

• Include ControllerInstrumentation module with ActiveSupport.on_load

The agent will now use the on_load :action_controller hook to include the ControllerInstrumentation module into both the Base and API classes of ActionController for Rails 5. This ensures that the proper load order is retained, minimizing side-effects of having the agent in an application.

• Ensure values for revisions on Capistrano deploy notices

Previously, running the task to look up the changelog could generate an error, if there weren't previous and current revisions defined. This has now been fixed. Thanks Winfield Peterson for the contribution!

• External Segment Rewrites

The agent has made internal changes to how it represents segments for external web requests.

v3.17.2

• compatibility with ruby 2.4.0-preview3

the ruby agent has been updated to work on ruby 2.4.0-preview3.

• Early Access Sinatra 2.0 instrumentation

Our Sinatra instrumentation has been updated to work with Sinatra 2.0.0.beta2.

• Include controller instrumentation module in Rails 5 API

The agent now includes the ControllerInstrumentation module into ActionController::API. This gives Rails API controllers access to helper methods like newrelic_ignore in support of the existing event-subscription-based action instrumentation. Thanks Andreas Thurn for the contribution!

• Use Module#prepend for ActiveRecord 5 Instrumentation

Rails 5 deprecated the use of alias_method_chain in favor of using Module#prepend. Mixing Module#prepend and alias_method_chain can lead to a SystemStackError when an alias_method_chain is applied after a module has been prepended. This should ensure better compatibility between our ActiveRecord Instrumentation and other third party gems that modify ActiveRecord using Module#prepend.

• Use license key passed into NewRelic::Agent.manual_start

Previously, the license key passed in when manually starting the agent with NewRelic::Agent.manual_start was not referenced when setting up the connection to report data to New Relic. This is now fixed.

• Account for DataMapper database connection errors

Our DataMapper instrumentation traces instances of DataObjects::SQLError being raised and removes the password from the URI attribute. However, when DataObjects cannot connect to the database (ex: could not resolve host), it will raise a DataObjects::ConnectionError. This inherits from DataObjects::SQLError but has nil for its URI attribute, since no connection has been made yet. To avoid the password check here on nil, the agent catches and re-raises any instances of DataObjects::ConnectionError explicitly. Thanks Postmodern for this contribution!

• Account for request methods that require arguments

When tracing a transaction, the agent tries to get the request object from a controller if it wasn't explicitly passed in. However, this posed problems in non-controller transactions with their own request methods defined that required arguments, such as in Resque jobs. This is now fixed.

v3.17.1

• Datastore instance reporting for Redis, MongoDB, and memcached

The agent now collects datastore instance information for Redis, MongoDB, and memcached. This information is displayed in transaction traces and slow query traces. For memcached only, multi requests will expand to individual server nodes, and the operation and key(s) will show in the trace details "Database query" section. Metrics for get_multi nodes will change slightly. Parent nodes for a get_multi will be recorded as generic segments. Their children will be recorded as datastore segments under the name get_multi_request and represent a batch request to a single Memcached instance.

• Rescue errors from attempts to fetch slow query explain plans

For slow queries through ActiveRecord 4+, the agent will attempt to fetch an explain plan on SELECT statements. In the event that this causes an error, such as being run on an adapter that doesn't implement exec_query, the agent will now rescue and log those errors.

v3.17.0

• Datastore instance reporting for ActiveRecord

The agent now collects database instance information for ActiveRecord operations, when using the MySQL and Postgres adapters. This information (database server and database name) is displayed in transaction traces and slow query traces.

v3.16.3

• Add :trace_only option to notice_error API

Previously, calling notice_error would record the trace, increment the error count, and consider the transaction failing for Apdex purposes. This method now accepts a :trace_only boolean option which, if true, will only record the trace and not affect the error count or transaction.

• HTTP.rb support

The agent has been updated to add instrumentation support for the HTTP gem, including Cross Application Tracing. Thanks Tiago Sousa for the contribution!

• Prevent redundant Delayed::Job instrumentation installation

This change was to handle situations where multiple Delayed::Worker instances are being created but Delayed::Job has already been instrumented. Thanks Tony Brown for the contribution!

v3.16.2

• Fix for "Unexpected frame in traced method stack" errors

Our ActiveRecord 4.x instrumentation could have generated "Unexpected frame in traced method stack" errors when used outside of an active transaction (for example, in custom background job handlers). This has been fixed.

v3.16.1

• Internal datastore instrumentation rewrites

The agent's internal tracing of datastore segments has been rewritten, and instrumentation updated to utilize the new classes.

• Fix Grape endpoint versions in transaction names

Grape 0.16 changed Route#version (formerly #route_version) to possibly return an Array of versions for the current endpoint. The agent has been updated to use rack.env['api.version'] set by Grape, and fall back to joining the version Array with '|' before inclusion in the transaction name when api.version is not available. Thanks Geoff Massanek for the contribution!

• Fix deprecation warnings from various Rails error subclasses

Rails 5 deprecates #original_exception on a few internal subclasses of StandardError in favor of Exception#cause from Ruby stdlib. The agent has been updated to try Exception#cause first, thus avoiding deprecation warnings. Thanks Alexander Stuart-Kregor for the contribution!

• Fix instrumentation for Sequel 4.35.0

The latest version of Sequel changes the name and signature of the method that the Ruby Agent wraps for instrumentation. The agent has been updated to handle these changes. Users using Sequel 4.35.0 or newer should upgrade their agent.

• Fix DataMapper instrumentation for additional versions

Different versions of DataMapper have different methods for retrieving the adapter name, and Postmodern expanded our coverage. Thanks for the contribution!

v3.16.0

• Official Rails 5.0 support

This version of the agent has been verified against the Rails 5.0.0 release.

• Early access Action Cable instrumentation

The Ruby agent instruments Action Cable channel actions and calls to ActionCable::Channel#Transmit in Rails 5. Feedback is welcome!

• Obfuscate queries from oracle_enhanced adapter correctly

This change allows the oracle_enhanced adapter to use the same obfuscation as oracle adapters. Thanks Dan Drinkard for the contribution!

• Make it possible to define a newrelic_role for deployment with Capistrano 3

Thanks NielsKSchjoedt for the contribution!

• Retry initial connection to New Relic in Resque master if needed

Previously, if the initial connection to New Relic in a monitored Resque master process failed, the agent would not retry, and monitoring for the process would be lost. This has been fixed, and the agent will continue retrying in its background harvest thread until it successfully connects.

v3.15.2

• Run explain plans on parameterized slow queries in AR4

In our ActiveRecord 4 instrumentation, we moved to tracing slow queries using the payloads from ActiveSupport::Notifications sql.active_record events. As a result, we were unable to run explain plans on parameterized queries. This has now been updated to pass along and use the parameter values, when available, to get the explain plans.

• Fix getMore metric grouping issue in Mongo 2.2.x instrumentation

A metric grouping issue had cropped up when using the most recent Mongo gem (2.2.0) with the most recent release of the server (3.2.4). We now have a more future-proof setup for preventing these.

• Restore older DataMapper support after password obfuscation fix

Back in 3.14.3, we released a fix to avoid inadvertently sending sensitive information from DataMapper SQLErrors. Our implementation did not account for DataMapper versions below v0.10.0 not implementing the #options accessor. Thanks Bram de Vries for the fix to our fix!

• Padrino 0.13.1 Support

Users with Padrino 0.13.x apps were previously seeing the default transaction name "(unknown)" for all of their routes. We now provide the full Padrino route template in transaction names, including any parameter placeholders. Thanks Robert Schulze for the contribution!

• Update transaction naming for Grape 0.16.x

In Grape 0.16.x, route_ methods are no longer prefixed. Thanks to Daniel Doubrovkine for the contribution!

• Fix name collision on method created for default metric name fix

We had a name collision with the yard gem, which sets a class_name method on Module. We've renamed our internal method to derived_class_name instead.

v3.15.1

• Rack 2 alpha support

This release includes experimental support for Rack 2 as of 2.0.0.alpha. Rack 2 is still in development, but the agent should work as expected for those who are experimenting with Rack 2.

• Rails 5 beta 3 support

We've tweaked our Action View instrumentation to accommodate changes introduced in Rails v5.0.0.beta3.

• Defer referencing ::ActiveRecord::Base to avoid triggering its autoloading too soon

In 3.12.1 and later versions of the agent, the agent references (and therefore loads) ActiveRecord::Base earlier on in the Rails loading process. This could jump ahead of initializers that should be run first. We now wait until ActiveRecord::Base is loaded elsewhere.

• Fix explain plans for non-parameterized queries with single quote literals

The agent does not run explain plans for queries still containing parameters (such as SELECT * FROM UNICORNS WHERE ID = $1 LIMIT 1). This check was unfortunately mutating the query to be obfuscated, causing an inability to collect an explain plan. This has now been fixed.

• Fix default metric name for tracing class methods

When using add_method_tracer on a class method but without passing in a metric_name_code, the default metric name will now look like Custom/ClassName/Class/method_name. We also addressed default metric names for anonymous classes and modules.

• Fix issue when rendering SQL strings in developer mode

When we obfuscate SQL statements, we rewrite the Statement objects as SQL strings inline in our sample buffers at harvest time. However, in developer mode, we also read out of these buffers when rendering pages. Depending on whether a harvest has run yet, the buffer will contain either Statement objects, SQL strings, or a mix. Now, developer mode can handle them all!

• Fix DelayedJob Sampler reporting incorrect counts in Active Record 3 and below

When fixing various deprecation warnings on ActiveRecord 4, we introduced a regression in our DelayedJob sampler which caused us to incorrectly report failed and locked job counts in ActiveRecord 3 and below. This is now fixed. Thanks Rangel Dokov for the contribution!

v3.15.0

• Rails 5 support

This release includes experimental support for Rails 5 as of 5.0.0.beta2. Please note that this release does not include any support for ActionCable, the WebSockets framework new to Rails 5.

• Don't include extension from single format Grape API transaction names

Starting with Grape 0.12.0, an API with a single format no longer declares methods with .:format, but with an extension such as .json. Thanks Daniel Doubrovkine for the contribution!

• Fix warnings about shadowing outer local variable when running tests

Thanks Rafael Almeida de Carvalho for the contribution!

• Check config first for Rails middleware instrumentation installation

Checking the config first avoids issues with mock classes that don't implement VERSION. Thanks Jesse Sanford for the contribution!

• Remove a trailing whitespace in the template for generated newrelic.yml

Thanks Paul Menzel for the contribution!

• Reference external resources in comments and readme with HTTPS

Thanks Benjamin Quorning for the contribution!

v3.14.3

• Don't inadvertently send sensitive information from DataMapper SQLErrors

DataObjects::SQLError captures the SQL query, and when using versions of data_objects prior to 0.10.8, built a URI attribute that contained the database connection password. The :query attribute now respects the obfuscation level set for slow SQL traces and splices out any password parameters to the URI when sending up traced errors to New Relic.

• Improved SQL obfuscation algorithm

To help standardize SQL obfuscation across New Relic language agents, we've improved the algorithm used and added more test cases.

• Configurable longer sql_id attribute on slow SQL traces

The sql_id attribute on slow SQL traces is used to aggregate normalized queries together. Previously, these IDs would generally be 9-10 digits long, due to a backend restriction. If slow_sql.use_longer_sql_id is set to true, these IDs will now be 18-19 digits long.

v3.14.2

• Improved transaction names for Sinatra

The agent will now use sinatra.route for transaction names on Sinatra 1.4.3+, which sets it in the request environment. This gives names that closer resemble the routes defined in the Sinatra DSL. Thanks to Brian Phillips for the suggestion!

• Bugfix for error flag on transaction events

There was an issue causing the error flag to always be set to false for Insights transaction events that has been fixed.

• Official support for Sidekiq 4

The Ruby agent now officially supports Sidekiq 4.

• Additional attributes collected

The agent now collects the following information in web transactions: Content-Length HTTP response and Content-Type HTTP request headers.

v3.14.1

• Add support for setting a display name on hosts

You can now configure a display name for your hosts using process_host.display_name, to more easily distinguish dynamically assigned hosts. For more info, see https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/apm/new-relic-apm/maintenance/add-rename-remove-hosts#display_name

• Fixes automatic middleware instrumentation for Puma 2.12.x

Starting with version 2.12.x the Puma project inlines versions of Rack::Builder and Rack::URLMap under the Puma namespace. This had the unfortunate side effect of breaking automatic Rack middleware instrumentation. We now instrument Puma::Rack::Builder and Puma::Rack::URLMap and once again have automatic Rack middleware instrumentation for applications running on Puma.

• Do not use a DelayedJob's display_name for naming the transaction

A DelayedJob's name may be superceded by a display_name, which can lead to a metric grouping issue if the display_name contains unique identifiers. We no longer use job name methods that may lead to an arbitrary display_name. Instead, we use the appropriate class and/or method names, depending what makes sense for the job and how it's called.

• Improvements to Mongo 2.1.x instrumentation

Fixes issue where getMore operations in batched queries could create metric grouping issues. Previously when multiple Mongo queries executed in the same scope only a single query was recorded as part of a transaction trace. Now transaction trace nodes will be created for every query executed during a transaction.

• Bugfix for NewRelic::Agent.notice_error

Fixes issue introduced in v3.14.0 where calling NewRelic::Agent.notice_error outside of an active transaction results in a NoMethodError.

• Bugfix for Resque TransactionError events

Fixes error preventing Transaction Error events generated in Resque tasks from being sent to New Relic.

v3.14.0

• pruby marshaller removed

The deprecated pruby marshaller has now been removed; the marshaller config option now only accepts json. Customers still running Ruby 1.8.7/REE must add the json gem to their Gemfile, or (preferably) upgrade to Ruby 1.9.3 or newer.

• Log dates in ISO 8601 format

The agent will now log dates in ISO 8601 (YYYY-mm-dd) format, instead of mm/dd/yy.

• Additional attributes collected

The agent now collects the following information in web transactions: Accept, Host, User-Agent, Content-Length HTTP request headers, HTTP request method, and Content-Type HTTP response header.

• TransactionErrors reported for Advanced Analytics for APM Errors

With this release, the agent reports TransactionError events. These new events power the beta feature Advanced Analytics for APM Errors. The error events are also available today through New Relic Insights.

Advanced Analytics for APM Errors lets you see all of your errors, with granular detail. Filter and group by any attribute to analyze them. Take action to resolve issues through collaboration.

For more information, see https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/apm/applications-menu/events/view-apm-errors-error-traces

v3.13.2

• Don't fail to send data when using 'mathn' library

Version 3.12.1 introduced a bug with applications using the 'mathn' library that would prevent the agent from sending data to New Relic. This has been fixed.

v3.13.1

• Don't use a pager when running git log command

This would cause Capistrano deploys to hang when a large number of commits were being deployed. Thanks to John Naegle for reporting and fixing this issue!

• Official support for JRuby 9.0.0.0

The Ruby agent is now officially fully tested and supported on JRuby 9.0.0.0.

• Instrumentation for MongoDB 2.1.x

Visibility in your MongoDB queries returns when using version 2.1.0 of the Mongo driver or newer. Thanks to Durran Jordan of MongoDB for contributing the Mongo Monitoring instrumentation!

• Fix for ArgumentError "invalid byte sequence in UTF-8"

This would come up when trying to parse out the operation from a database query containing characters that would trigger a invalid byte sequence in UTF-8 error. Thanks to Mario Izquierdo for reporting this issue!

• Improved database metric names for ActiveRecord::Calculations queries

Aggregate metrics recorded for queries made via the ActiveRecord::Calculations module (#count, #sum, #max, etc.) will now be associated with the correct model name, rather than being counted as generic 'select' operations.

• Allow at_exit handlers to be installed for Rubinius

Rubinius can support the at_exit block used by install_exit_handler. Thanks to Aidan Coyle for reporting and fixing this issue!

v3.13.0

• Bugfix for uninitialized constant NewRelic::Agent::ParameterFiltering

Users in some environments encountered a NameError: uninitialized constant NewRelic::Agent::ParameterFiltering from the Rails instrumentation while running v3.12.x of the Ruby agent. This issue has been fixed.

• Rake task instrumentation

The Ruby agent now provides opt-in tracing for Rake tasks. If you run long jobs via Rake, you can get all the visibility and goodness of New Relic that your other background jobs have. To enable this, see https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/agents/ruby-agent/frameworks/rake

• Redis instrumentation

Redis operations will now show up on the Databases tab and in transaction traces. By default, only command names will be captured; to capture command arguments, set transaction_tracer.record_redis_arguments to true in your configuration.

• Fix for over-obfuscated SQL Traces and PostgreSQL

An issue with the agent obfuscating column and table names from Slow SQL Traces when using PostgreSQL has been resolved.

• Rubinius 2.5.8 VM metric renaming support

Rubinius 2.5.8 changed some VM metric names and eliminated support for total allocated object counters. The agent has been updated accordingly.

• Fix agent attributes with a value of false not being stored

An issue introduced in v3.12.1 prevented attributes (like those added with add_custom_attributes) from being stored if their value was false. This has been fixed.

v3.12.1

• More granular Database metrics for ActiveRecord 3 and 4

Database metrics recorded for non-SELECT operations (UPDATE, INSERT, DELETE, etc.) on ActiveRecord 3 and 4 now include the model name that the query was being executed against, allowing you to view these queries broken down by model on the Datastores page. Thanks to Bill Kayser for reporting this issue!

• Support for Multiverse testing third party gems

The Ruby agent has rich support for testing multiple gem versions, but previously that wasn't accessible to third party gems. Now you can now simply require 'task/multiverse' in your Rakefile to access the same test:multiverse task that New Relic uses itself. For more details, see:

https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/agents/ruby-agent/frameworks/third-party-instrumentation#testing-your-extension

• Use Sidekiq 3.x's error handler

Sidekiq 3.x+ provides an error handler for internal and middleware related failures. Failures at these points were previously unseen by the Ruby agent, but now they are properly traced.

• Better error messages for common configuration problems with Capistrano

Templating errors in newrelic.yml would result in obscure error messages during Capistrano deployments. These messages now more properly reflect the root cause of the errors.

• newrelic_ignore methods allow strings

The newrelic_ignore methods previously only supported passing symbols, and would quietly ignore any strings passed. Now strings can be passed as well to get the intuitive ignoring behavior you'd expect.

• Replace DNS resolver for Resque jobs with Resolv

In some circumstances customers with a very high number of short-lived Resque jobs were experiencing deadlocks during DNS resolution. Resolv is an all Ruby DNS resolver that replaces the libc implementation to prevent these deadlocks.

v3.12.0

• Flexible capturing of attributes

The Ruby agent now allows you more control over exactly which request parameters and job arguments are attached to transaction traces, traced errors, and Insights events. For details, see:

https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/agents/ruby-agent/ruby-agent-attributes

• Fixed missing URIs in traces for retried Excon requests

If Excon's idempotent option retried a request, the transaction trace node for the call would miss having the URI assigned. This has been fixed.

• Capturing request parameters from rescued exceptions in Grape

If an exception was handled via a rescue_from in Grape, request parameters were not properly set on the error trace. This has been fixed. Thanks to Ankit Shah for helping us spot the bug.

v3.11.2

• Better naming for Rack::URLMap

If a Rack app made direct use of Rack::URLMap, instrumentation would miss out on using the clearest naming based on the app class. This has been fixed.

• Avoid performance regression in makara database adapter

Delegation in the makara database adapter caused performance issues when the agent looked up a connection in the pool. The agent now uses a faster lookup to work around this problem in makara, and allocates less as well. Thanks Mike Nelson for the help in resolving this!

• Allow audit logging to STDOUT

Previously audit logs of the agent's communication with New Relic could only write to a file. This prevented using the feature on cloud providers like Heroku. Now STDOUT is an allowed destination for audit_log.path. Logging can also be restricted to certain endpoints via audit_log.endpoints.

For more information see https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/agents/ruby-agent/installation-configuration/ruby-agent-configuration#audit_log

• Fix for crash during startup when Rails required but not used

If an application requires Rails but wasn't actually running it, the Ruby agent would fail during startup. This has been fixed.

• Use IO.select explicitly in the event loop

If an application adds their own select method to Object/Kernel or mixes in a module that overrides the select method (as with ActionView::Helpers) we would previously have used their implementation instead of the intended IO.select, leading to all sorts of unusual errors. We now explicitly reference IO.select in the event loop to avoid these issues.

• Fix for background thread hangs on old Linux kernels

When running under Ruby 1.8.7 on Linux kernel versions 2.6.11 and earlier, the background thread used by the agent to report data would hang, leading to no data being reported. This has been be fixed.

v3.11.1

If an application adds their own select method to Object/Kernel or mixes in a module that overrides the select method (as with ActionView::Helpers) we would previously have used their implementation instead of the intended IO.select, leading to all sorts of unusual errors. We now explicitly reference IO.select in the event loop to avoid these issues.

• Fix for background thread hangs on old Linux kernels

When running under Ruby 1.8.7 on Linux kernel versions 2.6.11 and earlier, the background thread used by the agent to report data would hang, leading to no data being reported. This has been be fixed.

v3.11.1

The Ruby agent incorrectly rescued exceptions at a point which caused sequel_pg 1.6.11 to segfault. This has been fixed. Thanks to Oldrich Vetesnik for the report!

v3.11.0

• Unified view for SQL database and NoSQL datastore products.

The response time charts in the application overview page will now include NoSQL datastores, such as MongoDB, and also the product name of existing SQL databases such as MySQL, Postgres, etc.

The Databases page will now enable the filtering of metrics and operations by product, and includes a table listing all operations.

For existing SQL databases, in addition to the existing breakdown of SQL statements and operations, the queries are now also associated with the database product being used.

For NoSQL datastores, such as MongoDB, we have now added information about operations performed against those products, similar to what is being done for SQL databases.

Because this introduces a notable change to how SQL database metrics are collected, it is important that you upgrade the agent version on all hosts. If you are unable to transition to the latest agent version on all hosts at the same time, you can still access old and new metric data for SQL databases, but the information will be split across two separate views.

For more information see https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/apm/applications-menu/monitoring/databases-slow-queries-dashboard

• Track background transactions as Key Transactions

In prior versions of the Ruby agent, only web transactions could be tracked as Key Transactions. This functionality is now available to all transactions, including custom Apdex values and X-Ray sessions.

For more information see https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/apm/selected-transactions/key-transactions/key-transactions-tracking-important-transactions-or-events

• More support and documentation for third-party extensions

It's always been possible to write extension gems for the Ruby agent, but now there's one location with best practices and recommendations to guide you in writing extensions. Check out https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/agents/ruby-agent/frameworks/third-party-instrumentation

We've also added simpler APIs for tracing datastores and testing your extensions. It's our way of giving back to everyone who's helped build on the agent over the years. <3

• Fix for anonymous class middleware naming

Metric names based off anonymous middlewares lacked a class name in the UI. The Ruby agent will now look for a superclass, or default to AnonymousClass in those cases.

• Improved exit behavior in the presence of Sinatra

The agent uses an at_exit hook to ensure data from the last < 60s before a process exits is sent to New Relic. Previously, this hook was skipped if Sinatra::Application was defined. This unfortunately missed data for short-lived background processes that required, but didn't run, Sinatra. Now the agent only skips its at_exit hook if Sinatra actually runs from at_exit.

v3.10.0

• Support for the Grape framework

We now instrument the Grape REST API framework! To avoid conflicts with the third-party newrelic-grape gem, our instrumentation will not be installed if newrelic-grape is present in the Gemfile.

For more details, see https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/agents/ruby-agent/frameworks/grape-instrumentation

• Automatic Cross Application Tracing support for all Rack applications

Previously Rack apps not using Rails or Sinatra needed to include the AgentHooks middleware to get Cross Application Tracing support. With these changes, this is no longer necessary. Any explicit references to AgentHooks can be removed unless the disable_middleware_instrumentation setting is set to true.

• Metrics no longer reported from Puma master processes

When using Puma's cluster mode with the preload_app! configuration directive, the agent will no longer start its reporting thread in the Puma master process. This should result in more accurate instance counts, and more accurate stats on the Ruby VMs page (since the master process will be excluded).

• Better support for Sinatra apps used with Rack::Cascade

Previously, using a Sinatra application as part of a Rack::Cascade chain would cause all transactions to be named after the Sinatra application, rather than allowing downstream applications to set the transaction name when the Sinatra application returned a 404 response. This has been fixed.

• Updated support for Rubinius 2.3+ metrics

Rubinius 2.3 introduced a new system for gathering metrics from the underlying VM. Data capture for the Ruby VM's page has been updated to take advantage of these. Thanks Yorick Peterse for the contribution!

• Fix for missing ActiveJob traced errors

ActiveJobs processed by backends where the Ruby agent lacked existing instrumentation missed reporting traced errors. This did not impact ActiveJobs used with Sidekiq or Resque, and has been fixed.

• Fix possible crash in middleware tracing

In rare circumstances, a failure in the agent early during tracing of a web request could lead to a cascading error when trying to capture the HTTP status code of the request. This has been fixed. Thanks to Michal Cichra for the fix!

v3.9.9

• Support for Ruby 2.2

A new version of Ruby is available, and the Ruby agent is ready to run on it. We've been testing things out since the early previews so you can upgrade to the latest and greatest and use New Relic right away to see how the new Ruby's performing for you.

• Support for Rails 4.2 and ActiveJob

Not only is a new Ruby available, but a new Rails is out too! The Ruby agent provides all the usual support for Rails that you'd expect, and we instrument the newly released ActiveJob framework that's part of 4.2.

• Security fix for handling of error responses from New Relic servers

This release fixes a potential security issue wherein an attacker who was able to impersonate New Relic's servers could have triggered arbitrary code execution in agent's host processes by sending a specially-crafted error response to a data submission request.

This issue is mitigated by the fact that the agent uses SSL certificate checking in order to verify the identity of the New Relic servers to which it connects. SSL is enabled by default by the agent, and can be enforced account-wide by enabling High Security Mode for your account:

https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/accounts-partnerships/accounts/security/high-security

• Fix for transactions with invalid URIs

If an application used the agent's ignore_url_regexes config setting to ignore certain transactions, but received an invalid URI, the agent would fail to record the transaction. This has been fixed.

• Fixed incompatibility with newrelic-grape

The 3.9.8 release of the Ruby agent included disabled prototyped instrumentation for the Grape API framework. This introduced an incompatibility with the existing third party extension newrelic-grape. This has been fixed. Newrelic-grape continues to be the right solution until full agent support for Grape is available.

v3.9.8

• Custom Insights events API

In addition to attaching custom parameters to the events that the Ruby agent generates automatically for each transaction, you can now record custom event types into Insights with the new NewRelic::Agent.record_custom_event API.

For details, see https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/insights/new-relic-insights/adding-querying-data/inserting-custom-events-new-relic-agents

• Reduced memory usage for idling applications

Idling applications using the agent could previously appear to leak memory because of native allocations during creation of new SSL connections to our servers. These native allocations didn't factor into triggering Ruby's garbage collector.

The agent will now re-use a single TCP connection to our servers for as long as possible, resulting in improved memory usage for applications that are idling and not having GC triggered for other reasons.

• Don't write to stderr during CPU sampling

The Ruby agent's code for gathering CPU information would write error messages to stderr on some FreeBSD systems. This has been fixed.

• LocalJumpError on Rails 2.x

Under certain conditions, Rails 2.x controller instrumentation could fail with a LocalJumpError when an action was not being traced. This has been fixed.

• Fixed config lookup in warbler packaged apps

When running a Ruby application from a standalone warbler .jar file on JRuby, the packaged config/newrelic.yml was not properly found. This has been fixed, and thanks to Bob Beaty for the help getting it fixed!

• Hash iteration failure in middleware

If a background thread iterated over the keys in the Rack env hash, it could cause failures in New Relic's AgentHooks middleware. This has been fixed.

v3.9.7

• Support for New Relic Synthetics

The Ruby agent now gives you additional information for requests from New Relic Synthetics. More transaction traces and events give you a clearer look into how your application is performing around the world.

For more details, see https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/synthetics/new-relic-synthetics/getting-started/new-relic-synthetics

• Support for multiple job per fork gems with Resque

The resque-jobs-per-fork and resque-multi-job-forks gems alter Resque to fork every N jobs instead of every job. This previously caused issues for the Ruby agent, but those have been resolved. These gems are fully supported.

Running Resque with the FORK_PER_JOB=false environment variable setting is also supported now.

For more details on our Resque support, see https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/agents/ruby-agent/background-jobs/resque-instrumentation

• Support agent when starting Resque Pool from Rake task

When running resque-pool with its provided rake tasks, the agent would not start-up properly. Thanks Tiago Sousa for the fix!

• Fix for DelayedJob + Rails 4.x queue depth metrics

The Ruby agent periodically records DelayedJob queuedepth as a metric, but this didn't work properly in Rails 4.x applications. This has been fixed. Thanks Jonathan del Strother for his help with the issue!

• Fix for failure in background transactions with rules.ignore_url_regexes

The recently added feature for ignoring transactions via URL regexes caused errors for non-web transactions. This has been fixed.

• Rename the TransactionNamer.name method to TransactionNamer.name_for

The internal TransactionNamer class had a class method called 'name', with a different signature than the existing Class#name method and could cause problems when trying to introspect instances of the class.

Thanks to Dennis Taylor for contributing this fix!

v3.9.6

• Rails 4.2 ActiveJob support

A new version of Rails is coming! One of the highlight features is ActiveJob, a framework for interacting with background job processors. This release of the Ruby agent adds instrumentation to give you insight into ActiveJob, whether you're just testing it out or running it for real.

Metrics are recorded around enqueuing ActiveJobs, and background transactions are started for any ActiveJob performed where the agent didn't already provide specific instrumentation (such as DelayedJob, Resque and Sidekiq).

Since Rails 4.2 is still in beta we'd love to hear any feedback on this instrumentation so it'll be rock solid for the general release!

• Ruby 2.2.0-preview1 updates

Ruby 2.2.0 is on its way later in the year, and the Ruby agent is ready for it. Updates to the GC stats and various other small changes have already been applied, and our automated tests are running against 2.2.0 so the agent will be ready on release day.

• Ignoring transactions by URL

While you could always ignore transactions by controller and action, the Ruby agent previously lacked a way to ignore by specific URLs or patterns without code changes. This release adds the config setting, rules.ignore_url_regexes to ignore specific transactions based on the request URL as well. For more information, see the documentation at: https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/agents/ruby-agent/installation-configuration/ignoring-specific-transactions#config-ignoring

• Better dependency detection in non-Rack applications

The Ruby agent runs dependency detection at key points in the Rack and Rails lifecycle, but non-Rails apps could occasionally miss out instrumenting late loaded libraries. The agent now runs an additional dependency detection during manual_start to more seamlessly install instrumentation in any app.

• Excluding /newrelic routes from developer mode

Recent changes to track time in middleware resulted in New Relic's developer mode capturing its own page views in the list. This has been fixed. Thanks to Ignatius Reza Lesmana for the report!

• Spikes in external time

Timeouts during certain external HTTP requests could result in incorrect large spikes in the time recorded by the agent. This has been fixed.

• Recognize browser_monitoring.auto_instrument setting in non-Rails apps

The browser_monitoring.auto_instrument config setting disables auto-injection of JavaScript into your pages, but was not properly obeyed in Sinatra and other non-Rails contexts. This has been fixed.

• Failures to gather CPU thread time on JRuby

JRuby running on certain JVM's and operating systems (FreeBSD in particular) did not always support the method being used to gather CPU burn metrics. This would result in a failure during those transactions. This has been fixed.

• Fix for rare race condition in Resque instrumentation

A race condition in the agent's Resque instrumentation that could cause rare Resque job failures in high-throughput Resque setups has been fixed. This bug would manifest as an exception with the following error message: "RuntimeError: can't add a new key into hash during iteration" and a backtrace leading through the PipeChannelManager class in the agent.

v3.9.5

• Per-dyno data on Heroku

When running on Heroku, data from the agent can now be broken out by dyno name, allowing you to more easily see what's happening on a per-dyno level. Dynos on Heroku are now treated in the same way that distinct hosts on other platforms work.

By default, 'scheduler' and 'run' dyno names will be aggregated into 'scheduler.' and 'run.' to avoid unbounded growth in the number of reported hostnames.

Read more about this feature on our Heroku docs page: https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/agents/ruby-agent/miscellaneous/ruby-agent-heroku

• HTTP response codes in Insights events

The Ruby agent will now capture HTTP response codes from Rack applications (including Rails and Sinatra apps) and include them under the httpResponseCode attribute on events sent to Insights.

• Stricter limits on memory usage of SQL traces

The agent now imposes stricter limits on the number of distinct SQL traces that it will buffer in memory at any point in time, leading to more predictable memory consumption even in exceptional circumstances.

• Improved reliability of thread profiling

Several issues that would previously have prevented the successful completion and transmission of thread profiles to New Relic's servers have been fixed.

These issues were related to the use of recursion in processing thread profiles, and have been addressed by both limiting the maximum depth of the backtraces recorded in thread profiles, and eliminating the agent's use of recursion in processing profile data.

• Allow tracing Rails view helpers with add_method_tracer

Previously, attempting to trace a Rails view helper method using add_method_tracer on the view helper module would lead to a NoMethodError when the traced method was called (undefined method `trace_execution_scoped'). This has been fixed.

This issue was an instance of the Ruby 'dynamic module inclusion' or 'double inclusion' problem. Usage of add_method_tracer now no longer relies upon the target class having actually picked up the trace_execution_scoped method from the NewRelic::Agent::MethodTracer module.

• Improved performance of queue time parsing

The number of objects allocated while parsing the front-end timestamps on incoming HTTP requests has been significantly reduced.

Thanks to Aleksei Magusev for the contribution!

v3.9.4

• Allow agent to use alternate certificate stores

When connecting via SSL to New Relic services, the Ruby agent verifies its connection via a certificate bundle shipped with the agent. This had problems with certain proxy configurations, so the ca_bundle_path setting in newrelic.yml can now override where the agent locates the cert bundle to use.

For more information see the documentation at: https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/agents/ruby-agent/installation-configuration/ssl-settings-ruby-agent

• Rails 4.2 beta in tests

Although still in beta, a new version of Rails is on its way! We're already running our automated test suites against the beta to ensure New Relic is ready the day the next Rails is released.

• ActiveRecord 4 cached queries fix

Queries that were hitting in the ActiveRecord 4.x query cache were incorrectly being counted as database time by the agent.

• Fix for error in newrelic.yml loading

If your application ran with a RAILS_ENV that was not listed in newrelic.yml recent agent versions would give a NameError rather than a helpful message. This has been fixed. Thanks Oleksiy Kovyrin for the patch!

v3.9.3

• Fix to prevent proxy credentials transmission

This update prevents proxy credentials set in the agent config file from being transmitted to New Relic.

v3.9.2

• Added API for ignoring transactions

This release adds three new API calls for ignoring transactions:

- `NewRelic::Agent.ignore_transaction`
- `NewRelic::Agent.ignore_apdex`
- `NewRelic::Agent.ignore_enduser`

The first of these ignores a transaction completely: nothing about it will be reported to New Relic. The second ignores only the Apdex metric for a single transaction. The third disables javascript injection for browser monitoring for the current transaction.

These methods differ from the existing newrelic*ignore** method in that they may be called *during* a transaction based on some dynamic runtime criteria, as opposed to at the class level on startup.

See the docs for more details on how to use these methods: https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/agents/ruby-agent/installation-and-configuration/ignoring-specific-transactions

• Improved SQL obfuscation

SQL queries containing string literals ending in backslash ('') characters would previously not have been obfuscated correctly by the Ruby agent prior to transmission to New Relic. In addition, SQL comments were left un-obfuscated. This has been fixed, and the test coverage for SQL obfuscation has been improved.

• newrelic_ignore* methods now work when called in a superclass

The newrelic_ignore* family of methods previously did not apply to subclasses of the class from which it was called, meaning that Rails controllers inheriting from a single base class where newrelic_ignore had been called would not be ignored. This has been fixed.

• Fix for rare crashes in Rack::Request#params on Sinatra apps

Certain kinds of malformed HTTP requests could previously have caused unhandled exceptions in the Ruby agent's Sinatra instrumentation, in the Rack::Request#params method. This has been fixed.

• Improved handling for rare errors caused by timeouts in Excon requests

In some rare cases, the agent would emit a warning message in its log file and abort instrumentation of a transaction if a timeout occurred during an Excon request initiated from within that transaction. This has been fixed.

• Improved behavior when the agent is misconfigured

When the agent is misconfigured by attempting to shut it down without it ever having been started, or by attempting to disable instrumentation after instrumentation has already been installed, the agent will no longer raise an exception, but will instead log an error to its log file.

• Fix for ignore_error_filter not working in some configurations

The ignore_error_filter method allows you to specify a block to be evaluated in order to determine whether a given error should be ignored by the agent. If the agent was initially disabled, and then later enabled with a call to manual_start, the ignore_error_filter would not work. This has been fixed.

• Fix for Capistrano 3 ignoring newrelic_revision

New Relic's Capistrano recipes support passing parameters to control the values recorded with deployments, but user provided :newrelic_revision was incorrectly overwritten. This has been fixed.

• Agent errors logged with ruby-prof in production

If the ruby-prof gem was available in an environment without New Relic's developer mode enabled, the agent would generate errors to its log. This has been fixed.

• Tighter requirements on naming for configuration environment variables

The agent would previously assume any environment variable containing 'NEWRELIC' was a configuration setting. It now looks for this string as a prefix only.

Thanks to Chad Woolley for the contribution!

v3.9.1

• Ruby 1.8.7 users: upgrade or add JSON gem now

Ruby 1.8.7 is end-of-lifed, and not receiving security updates, so we strongly encourage all users with apps on 1.8.7 to upgrade.

If you're not able to upgrade yet, be aware that a coming release of the Ruby agent will require users of Ruby 1.8.7 to have the 'json' gem available within their applications in order to continue sending data to New Relic.

For more details, see: https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/ruby/ruby-1.8.7-support

• Support for new Cross Application Trace view

This release enhances cross application tracing with a visualization of the cross application calls that a specific Transaction Trace is involved in. The new visualization helps you spot bottlenecks in external services within Transaction Traces and gives you an end-to-end understanding of how the transaction trace is used by other applications and services. This leads to faster problem diagnosis and better collaboration across teams. All agents involved in the cross application communication must be upgraded to see the complete graph. You can view cross application traces from in the Transaction Trace drill-down.

• High security mode V2

The Ruby agent now supports V2 of New Relic's high security mode. To enable it, you must add 'high_security: true' to your newrelic.yml file, and enable high security mode through the New Relic web interface. The local agent setting must be in agreement with the server-side setting, or the agent will shut down and no data will be collected.

Customers who already had the server-side high security mode setting enabled must add 'high_security: true' to their agent configuration files when upgrading to this release.

For details on high security mode, see: http://docs.newrelic.com/docs/accounts-partnerships/accounts/security/high-security

• Improved memcached instrumentation

More accurate instrumentation for the 'cas' command when using version 1.8.0 or later of the memcached gem. Previous versions of the agent would count all time spent in the block given to 'cas' as memcache time, but 1.8.0 and later allows us to more accurately measure just the time spent talking to memcache.

Many thanks to Francis Bogsanyi for contributing this change!

• Improved support for Rails apps launched from outside the app root directory

The Ruby agent attempts to resolve the location of its configuration file at runtime relative to the directory that the host process is started from.

In cases where the host process was started from outside of the application's root directory (for example, if the process is started from '/'), it will now also attempt to locate its configuration file based on the value of Rails.root for Rails applications.

• Better compatibility with ActionController::Live

Browser Application Monitoring auto-injection can cause request failures under certain circumstances when used with ActionController::Live, so the agent will now automatically detect usage of ActionController::Live, and not attempt auto-injection for those requests (even if auto-instrumentation is otherwise enabled).

Many thanks to Rodrigo Rosenfeld Rosas for help diagnosing this issue!

• Fix for occasional spikes in external services time

Certain kinds of failures during HTTP requests made by an application could have previously resulted in the Ruby agent reporting erroneously large amounts of time spent in outgoing HTTP requests. This issue manifested most obviously in spikes on the 'Web external' band on the main overview graph. This issue has now been fixed.

• Fix 'rake newrelic:install' for Rails 4 applications

The newrelic:install rake task was previously not working for Rails 4 applications and has been fixed.

Thanks to Murahashi Sanemat Kenichi for contributing this fix!

v3.9.0

• Rack middleware instrumentation

The Ruby agent now automatically instruments Rack middlewares!

This means that the agent can now give you a more complete picture of your application's response time, including time spent in middleware. It also means that requests which previously weren't captured by the agent because they never made it to the bottom of your middleware stack (usually a Rails or Sinatra application) will now be captured.

After installing this version of the Ruby agent, you'll see a new 'Middleware' band on your application's overview graph, and individual middlewares will appear in transaction breakdown charts and transaction traces.

The agent can instrument middlewares that are added from a config.ru file via Rack::Builder, or via Rails' middleware stack in Rails 3.0+.

This instrumentation may be disabled with the disable_middleware_instrumentation configuration setting.

For more details, see the documentation for this feature:

- http://docs.newrelic.com/docs/ruby/rack-middlewares
- http://docs.newrelic.com/docs/ruby/middleware-upgrade-changes

• Capistrano 3.x support

Recording application deployments using Capistrano 3.x is now supported.

Many thanks to Jennifer Page for the contribution!

• Better support for Sidekiq's Delayed extensions

Sidekiq jobs executed via the Delayed extensions (e.g. the #delay method) will now be named after the actual class that #delay was invoked against, and will have their job arguments correctly captured if the sidekiq.capture_params configuration setting is enabled.

Many thanks to printercu for the contribution!

• Improved Apdex calculation with ignored error classes

Previously, a transaction resulting in an exception that bubbled up to the top level would always be counted as failing for the purposes of Apdex calculations (unless the transaction name was ignored entirely). Now, exceptions whose classes have been ignored by the error_collector.ignore_errors configuration setting will not cause a transaction to be automatically counted as failing.

• Allow URIs that are not parseable by stdlib's URI if addressable is present

There are some URIs that are valid by RFC 3986, but not parseable by Ruby's stdlib URI class. The Ruby agent will now attempt to use the addressable gem to parse URIs if it is present, allowing requests against these problematic URIs to be instrumented.

Many thanks to Craig R Webster and Amir Yalon for their help with this issue!

• More robust error collection from Resque processes

Previously, traced errors where the exception class was defined in the Resque worker but not in the Resque master process would not be correctly handled by the agent. This has been fixed.

• Allow Sinatra apps to set the New Relic environment without setting RACK_ENV

The NEW_RELIC_ENV environment variable may now be used to specify the environment the agent should use from its configuration file, independently of RACK_ENV.

Many thanks to Mario Izquierdo for the contribution!

• Better error handling in Browser Application Monitoring injection

The agent middleware that injects the JavaScript code necessary for Browser Application Monitoring now does a better job of catching errors that might occur during the injection process.

• Allow disabling of Net::HTTP instrumentation

Most instrumentation in the Ruby agent can be disabled easily via a configuration setting. Our Net::HTTP instrumentation was previously an exception, but now it can also be disabled with the disable_net_http configuration setting.

• Make Rails constant presence check more defensive

The Ruby agent now guards against the (rare) case where an application has a Rails constant defined, but no Rails::VERSION constant (because Rails is not actually present).

Many thanks to Vladimir Kiselev for the contribution!

v3.8.1

• Better handling for Rack applications implemented as middlewares

When using a Sinatra application as a middleware around another app (for example, a Rails app), or manually instrumenting a Rack middleware wrapped around another application, the agent would previously generate two separate transaction names in the New Relic UI (one for the middleware, and one for the inner application).

As of this release, the agent will instead unify these two parts into a single transaction in the UI. The unified name will be the name assigned to the inner-most traced transaction by default. Calls to NewRelic::Agent.set_transaction_name will continue to override the default names assigned by the agent's instrumentation code.

This change also makes it possible to run X-Ray sessions against transactions of the 'inner' application in cases where one instrumented app is wrapped in another that's implemented as a middleware.

• Support for mongo-1.10.0

The Ruby agent now instruments version 1.10.0 of the mongo gem (versions 1.8.x and 1.9.x were already supported, and continue to be).

• Allow setting configuration file path via an option to manual_start

Previously, passing the :config_path option to NewRelic::Agent.manual_start would not actually affect the location that the agent would use to look for its configuration file. This has been fixed, and the log messages emitted when a configuration file is not found should now be more helpful.

v3.8.0

• Better support for forking and daemonizing dispatchers (e.g. Puma, Unicorn)

The agent should now work out-of-the box with no special configuration on servers that fork or daemonize themselves (such as Unicorn or Puma in some configurations). The agent's background thread will be automatically restarted after the first transaction processed within each child process.

This change means it's no longer necessary to set the 'restart_thread_in_children setting' in your agent configuration file if you were doing so previously.

• Rails 4.1 support

Rails 4.1 has shipped, and the Ruby agent is ready for it! We've been running our test suites against the release candidates with no significant issues, so we're happy to announce full compatibility with this new release of Rails.

• Ruby VM measurements

The Ruby agent now records more detailed information about the performance and behavior of the Ruby VM, mainly focused around Ruby's garbage collector. This information is exposed on the new 'Ruby VM' tab in the UI. For details about what is recorded, see:

http://docs.newrelic.com/docs/ruby/ruby-vm-stats

• Separate in-transaction GC timings for web and background processes

Previously, an application with GC instrumentation enabled, and both web and background processes reporting into it would show an overly inflated GC band on the application overview graph, because data from both web and non-web transactions would be included. This has been fixed, and GC time during web and non-web transactions is now tracked separately.

• More accurate GC measurements on multi-threaded web servers

The agent could previously have reported inaccurate GC times on multi-threaded web servers such as Puma. It will now correctly report GC timings in multi-threaded contexts.

• Improved ActiveMerchant instrumentation

The agent will now trace the store, unstore, and update methods on ActiveMerchant gateways. In addition, a bug preventing ActiveMerchant instrumentation from working on Ruby 1.9+ has been fixed.

Thanks to Troex Nevelin for the contribution!

• More robust Real User Monitoring script injection with charset meta tags

Previous versions of the agent with Real User Monitoring enabled could have injected JavaScript code into the page above a charset meta tag. By the HTML5 spec, the charset tag must appear in the first 1024 bytes of the page, so the Ruby agent will now attempt to inject RUM script after a charset tag, if one is present.

• More robust connection sequence with New Relic servers

A rare bug that could cause the agent's initial connection handshake with New Relic servers to silently fail has been fixed, and better logging has been added to the related code path to ease diagnosis of any future issues.

• Prevent over-counting of queue time with nested transactions

When using add_transaction_tracer on methods called from within a Rails or Sinatra action, it was previously possible to get inflated queue time measurements, because queue time would be recorded for both the outer transaction (the Rails or Sinatra action) and the inner transaction (the method given to add_transaction_tracer). This has been fixed, so only the outermost transaction will now record queue time.

v3.7.3

• Obfuscation for PostgreSQL explain plans

Fixes an agent bug with PostgreSQL where parameters from the original query could appear in explain plans sent to New Relic servers, even when SQL obfuscation was enabled. Parameters from the query are now masked in explain plans prior to transmission when transaction_tracer.record_sql is set to 'obfuscated' (the default setting).

For more information, see: https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/traces/security-for-postgresql-explain-plans

• More accurate categorization of SQL statements

Some SQL SELECT statements that were previously being mis-categorized as 'SQL - OTHER' will now correctly be tagged as 'SQL - SELECT'. This particularly affected ActiveRecord users using PostgreSQL.

• More reliable Typhoeus instrumentation

Fixed an issue where an exception raised from a user-specified on_complete block would cause our Typhoeus instrumentation to fail to record the request.

• Fix for Puma 2.8.0 cluster mode (3.7.3.204)

Puma's 2.8.0 release renamed a hook New Relic used to support Puma's cluster mode. This resulted in missing data for users running Puma. Thanks Benjamin Kudria for the fix!

• Fix for deployment command bug (3.7.3.204)

Problems with file loading order could result in newrelic deployments failing with an unrecognized command error. This has been fixed.

v3.7.2

• Mongo instrumentation improvements

Users of the 'mongo' MongoDB client gem will get more detailed instrumentation including support for some operations that were not previously captured, and separation of aggregate metrics for web transactions from background jobs.

An issue with ensure_index when passed a symbol or string was also fixed. Thanks Maxime RETY for the report!

• More accurate error tracing in Rails 4

Traced errors in Rails 4 applications will now be correctly associated with the transaction they occurred in, and custom attributes attached to the transaction will be correctly attached to the traced error as well.

• More accurate partial-rendering metrics for Rails 4

View partials are now correctly treated as sub-components of the containing template render in Rails 4 applications, meaning that the app server breakdown graphs for Rails 4 transactions should be more accurate and useful.

• Improved Unicorn 4.8.0 compatibility

A rare issue that could lead to spurious traced errors on app startup for applications using Unicorn 4.8.0 has been fixed.

• meta_request gem compatibility

An incompatibility with the meta_request gem has been fixed.

• Typhoeus 0.6.4+ compatibility

A potential crash with Typhoeus 0.6.4+ when passing a URI object instead of a String instance to one of Typhoeus's HTTP request methods has been fixed.

• Sequel single threaded mode fix

The agent will no longer attempt to run EXPLAIN queries for slow SQL statements issued using the Sequel gem in single-threaded mode, since doing so could potentially cause crashes.

• Additional functionality for add_custom_parameters

Calling add_custom_parameters adds parameters to the system codenamed Rubicon. For more information, see http://newrelic.com/software-analytics

• Update gem signing cert (3.7.2.195)

The certificate used to sign newrelic_rpm expired in February. This patch updates that for clients installing with verification.

v3.7.1

• MongoDB support

The Ruby agent provides support for the mongo gem, versions 1.8 and 1.9! Mongo calls are captured for transaction traces along with their parameters, and time spent in Mongo shows up on the Database tab.

Support for more Mongo gems and more UI goodness will be coming, so watch http://docs.newrelic.com/docs/ruby/mongo for up-to-date status.

• Harvest thread restarts for forked and daemonized processes

Historically framework specific code was necessary for the Ruby agent to successfully report data after an app forked or daemonized. Gems or scripts with daemonizing modes had to wait for agent support or find workarounds.

With 3.7.1 setting restart_thread_in_children: true in your newrelic.yml automatically restarts the agent in child processes without requiring custom code. For now the feature is opt-in, but future releases may default it on.

• Fix for missing HTTP time

The agent previously did not include connection establishment time for outgoing Net::HTTP requests. This has been corrected, and reported HTTP timings should now be more accurate.

• Fix for Mongo ensure_index instrumentation (3.7.1.182)

The Mongo instrumentation for ensure_index in 3.7.1.180 was not properly calling through to the uninstrumented version of this method. This has been fixed in 3.7.1.182. Thanks to Yuki Miyauchi for the fix!

• Correct first reported metric timespan for forking dispatchers (3.7.1.188)

The first time a newly-forked process (in some configurations) reported metric data, it would use the startup time of the parent process as the start time for that metric data instead of its own start time. This has been fixed.

v3.7.0

• Official Rubinius support (for Rubinius >= 2.2.1)

We're happy to say that all known issues with the Ruby agent running on Rubinius have been resolved as of Rubinius version 2.2.1! See http://docs.newrelic.com/docs/ruby/rubinius for the most up-to-date status.

• RUM injection updates

The Ruby agent's code for both automatic and manual injection of Real User Monitoring scripts has been improved. No application changes are required, but the new injection logic is simpler, faster, more robust, and paves the way for future improvements to Real User Monitoring.

• More robust communication with New Relic

Failures when transmitting data to New Relic could cause data to be held over unnecessarily to a later harvest. This has been improved both to handle errors more robustly and consistently, and to send data as soon as possible.

• Fix for agent not restarting on server-side config changes

A bug in 3.6.9 caused the agent to not reset correctly after server-side config changes. New settings would not be received without a full process restart. This has been fixed.

• Blacklisting rake spec tasks

A blacklist helps the agent avoid starting during rake tasks. Some default RSpec tasks were missing. Thanks for the contribution Kohei Hasegawa!

v3.6.9

• 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 http://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!

v3.6.8

• 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.

• Percentiles and Histograms

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

• 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!

• Missing Resque transaction traces (3.6.8.168)

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 (3.6.8.168)

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 (3.6.8.168)

  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.

v3.6.7

• 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.

• Additional locking option for Resque (3.6.7.159)

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 (3.6.7.159)

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

• Unnecessary requests from Resque jobs (3.6.7.159)

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

• 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!

v3.6.6

• 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.

v3.6.5

• 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.

v3.6.4

• Exception Whitelist

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, though you can configure a whitelist of exceptions whose messages should be left 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.

v3.6.3

• 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.

v3.6.2

• Sequel support

The Ruby agent now supports Sequel, a database toolkit for Ruby. This includes capturing SQL calls and model operations in transaction traces, and recording slow SQL calls. See https://newrelic.com/docs/ruby/sequel-instrumentation for full details.

• Thread profiling fix

The prior release of the agent (version 3.6.1) broke thread profiling. A profile would appear to run, but return no data. This has been fixed.

• Fix for over-counted Net::HTTP calls

Under some circumstances, calls into Net::HTTP were being counted twice in metrics and transaction traces. This has been fixed.

• Missing traced errors for Resque applications

Traced errors weren't displaying for some Resque workers, although the errors were factored into the overall count graphs. This has been fixed, and traced errors should be available again after upgrading the agent.

v3.6.1

• Full URIs for HTTP requests are recorded in transaction traces

When recording a transaction trace node for an outgoing HTTP call via Net::HTTP, the agent will now save the full URI (instead of just the hostname) for the request. Embedded credentials, the query string, and the fragment will be stripped from the URI before it is saved.

• Simplify Agent Autostart Logic

Previously the agent would only start when it detected a supported "Dispatcher", meaning a known web server or background task framework. This was problematic for customers using webservers that the agent was not configured to detect (e.g. Puma). Now the agent will attempt to report any time it detects it is running in a monitored environment (e.g. production). There are two exceptions to this. The agent will not autostart in a rails console or irb session or when the process was invoked by a rake task (e.g. rake assets:precompile). The NEWRELIC_ENABLE environment variable can be set to true or false to force the agent to start or not start.

• Don't attempt to resolve collector hostname when proxy is in use

When a proxy is configured, the agent will not attempt to lookup and cache the IP address of New Relic server to which it is sending data, since DNS may not be available in some environments. Thanks to Bill Kirtley for the contribution

• Added NewRelic::Agent.set_transaction_name and NewRelic::Agent.get_transaction_name

Ordinarily the name of your transaction is defined up-front, but if you'd like to change the name of a transaction while it is still running you can use NewRelic::Agent.set_transaction_name(). Similarly, if you need to know the name of the currently running transaction, you can use NewRelic::Agent.get_transaction_name().

v3.6.0

• Sidekiq support

The Ruby agent now supports the Sidekiq background job framework. Traces from Sidekiq jobs will automatically show up in the Background tasks on New Relic similar to Resque and Delayed::Job tasks.

• Improved thread safety

The primary metrics data structures in the Ruby agent are now thread safe. This should provide better reliability for the agent under JRuby and threaded scenarios such as Sidekiq or Puma.

• More robust environment report

The agent's analysis of the local environment (e.g. OS, Processors, loaded gems) will now work in a wider variety of app environments, including Sinatra.

• Experimental Rainbows! support

The Ruby agent now automatically detects and instruments the Rainbows! web server. This support is considered experimental at present, and has not been tested with all dispatch modes.

Thanks to Joseph Chen for the contribution.

• Fix a potential file descriptor leak in Resque instrumentation

A file descriptor leak that occurred when DontPerform exceptions were used to abort processing of a job has been fixed. This should allow the Resque instrumentation work correctly with the resque-lonely_job gem.

v3.5.8

• Key Transactions

  The Ruby agent now supports Key Transactions! Check out more details on the feature at https://newrelic.com/docs/site/key-transactions

• Ruby 2.0

  The Ruby agent is compatible with Ruby 2.0.0 which was just released.

• Improved Sinatra instrumentation

  Several cases around the use of conditions and pass in Sinatra are now better supported by the Ruby agent. Thanks Konstantin for the help!

• Outbound HTTP headers

  Adds a 'X-NewRelic-ID' header to outbound Net::HTTP requests. This change helps improve the correlation of performance between services in a service- oriented architecture for a forthcoming feature. In the meantime, to disable the header, set this in your newrelic.yml:

  cross_application_tracer: enabled: false

• Automatically detect Resque dispatcher

  The agent does better auto-detection for the Resque worker process. This should reduce the need to set NEW_RELIC_DISPATCHER=resque directly.

v3.5.7

• Resolved some issues with tracking of frontend queue time, particularly when the agent is running on an app hosted on Heroku. The agent will now more reliably parse the headers described in https://newrelic.com/docs/features/tracking-front-end-time and will automatically detect whether the times provided are in seconds, milliseconds or microseconds.

v3.5.6

• Use HTTPS by default

  The agent now defaults to using SSL when it communicates with New Relic's servers. By default is already configured New Relic does not transmit any sensitive information (e.g. SQL parameters are masked), but SSL adds an additional layer of security. Upgrading customers may need to remove the "ssl: false" directive from their newrelic.yml to enable ssl. Customers on Jruby may need to install the jruby-openssl gem to take advantage of this feature.

• Fix two Resque-related issues

  Fixes a possible hang on exit of an instrumented Resque master process (https://github.com/defunkt/resque/issues/578), as well as a file descriptor leak that could occur during startup of the Resque master process.

• Fix for error graph over 100%

  Some errors were double counted toward the overall error total. This resulted in graphs with error percentages over 100%. This duplication did not impact the specific error traces captured, only the total metric.

• Notice gracefully handled errors in Sinatra

  When show_exceptions was set to false in Sinatra, errors weren't caught by New Relic's error collector. Now handled errors also have the chance to get reported back.

• Ruby 2.0 compatibility fixes

  Ruby 2.0 no longer finds protected methods by default, but will with a flag. http://tenderlovemaking.com/2012/09/07/protected-methods-and-ruby-2-0.html

  Thanks Ravil Bayramgalin and Charlie Somerville for the fixes.

• Auto-detect Trinidad as dispatcher

  Code already existing for detecting Trinidad as a dispatcher, but was only accessible via an ENV variable. This now auto-detects on startup. Thanks Robert Rasmussen for catching that.

• Coercion of types in collector communication

  Certain metrics can be recorded with a Ruby Rational type, which JSON serializes as a string rather than a floating point value. We now treat coerce each outgoing value, and log issues before sending the data.

• Developer mode fix for chart error

  Added require to fix a NameError in developer mode for summary page. Thanks to Ryan B. Harvey.

• Don't touch deprecated RAILS_ROOT if on Rails 3

  Under some odd startup conditions, we would look for the RAILS_ROOT constant after failing to find the ::Rails.root in a Rails 3 app, causing deprecation warnings. Thanks for Adrian Irving-Beer for the fix.

v3.5.5

• Add thread profiling support

  Thread profiling performs statistical sampling of backtraces of all threads within your Ruby processes. This feature requires MRI >= 1.9.2, and is controlled via the New Relic web UI. JRuby support (in 1.9.x compat mode) is considered experimental, due to issues with JRuby's Thread#backtrace.

• Add audit logging capability

  The agent can now log all of the data it sends to the New Relic servers to a special log file for human inspection. This feature is off by default, and can be enabled by setting the audit_log.enabled configuration key to true. You may also control the location of the audit log with the audit_log.path key.

• Use config system for dispatcher, framework, and config file detection

  Several aspects of the agent's configuration were not being handled by the configuration system. Detection/configuration of the dispatcher (e.g. passenger, unicorn, resque), framework (e.g. rails3, sinatra), and newrelic.yml location are now handled via the Agent environment, manual, and default configuration sources.

• Updates to logging across the agent

  We've carefully reviewed the logging messages that the agent outputs, adding details in some cases, and removing unnecessary clutter. We've also altered the startup sequence to ensure that we don't spam STDOUT with messages during initialization.

• Fix passing environment to manual_start()

  Thanks to Justin Hannus. The :env key, when passed to Agent.manual_start, can again be used to specify which section of newrelic.yml is loaded.

• Rails 4 support

  This release includes preliminary support for Rails 4 as of 4.0.0.beta. Rails 4 is still in development, but the agent should work as expected for people who are experimenting with the beta.

v3.5.4

• Add queue time support for sinatra apps

  Sinatra applications can now take advantage of front end queue time reporting. Thanks to Winfield Peterson for this contribution.

• Simplify queue time configuration for nginx 1.2.6+

  Beginning in version 1.2.6, recently released as a development version, the $msec variable can be used to set an http header. This change allows front end queue time to be tracked in New Relic simply by adding this line to the nginx config:

  proxy_set_header X-Queue-Start "t=${msec}000"

  It will no longer be necessary to compile a patched version of nginx or compile in the perl or lua module to enable this functionality.

  Thanks to Lawrence Pit for the contribution.

• Report back build number and stage along with version info

  In the 3.5.3 series the agent would fail to report its full version number to NewRelic's environment report. For example it would report its version as 3.5.3 instead of 3.5.3.25 or 3.5.3.25.beta. The agent will now report its complete version number as defined in newrelic_rpm.gemspec.

• The host and the port that the agent reports to can now be set from environment vars

  The host can be set with NEW_RELIC_HOST and the port with NEW_RELIC_PORT. These setting will override any other settings in your newrelic.yml.

• Fix RUM reporting to multiple applications

  When the agent is configured to report to multiple "roll up" applications RUM did not work correctly.

v3.5.3

• Update the collector protocol to use JSON and Ruby primitives

  The communication between the agent and the NewRelic will not longer be marshaled Ruby objects, but rather JSON in the case of Ruby 1.9 and marshaled Ruby primitives in the case of 1.8. This results in greater harvest efficiency as well as feature parity with other New Relic agents.

• Fix incorrect application of conditions in sinatra instrumentation

  The agent's sinatra instrumentation was causing sinatra's conditions to be incorrectly applied in some obscure cases. The bug was triggered when a condition was present on a lower priority route that would match the current request, except for the presence of a higher priority route.

v3.5.2

• Simplified process of running agent test suite and documented code contribution process in GUIDELINES_FOR_CONTRIBUTING.

v3.5.1

• Enabling Memory Profiling on Lion and Mountain Lion

  The agent's list of supported platforms for memory profiling wasn't correctly checking for more recent versions of OS X.

• Fixed an arity issue encountered when calling newrelic_notice_error from Rails applications.

• End user queue time was not being properly reported, works properly now.

• Server-side configuration for ignoring errors was not being heeded by agent.

• Better handling of a thread safety issue.

  Some issues may remain, which we are working to address, but they should be gracefully handled now, rather than crashing the running app.

• Use "java_import" rather than "include_class" when require Java Jars into a JRuby app.

  Thanks to Jan Habermann for the pull request

• Replaced alias_method mechanism with super call in DataMapper instrumentation.

  Thanks to Michael Rykov for the pull request

• Fixed the Rubinius GC profiler.

  Thanks to Dirkjan Bussink

• Use ActiveSupport.on_load to load controller instrumentation Rails 3.

  Thanks to Jonathan del Strother

• Reduce the number of thread local reference in a particular high traffic method

  Thanks to Jeremy Kemper

v3.5.0.1

• (Fix) Due to a serious resource leak we have ended support for versions of Phusion Passenger older than 2.1.1. Users of older versions are encouraged upgrade to a more recent version.

v3.5.0

• (Fix) RUM Stops Working After 3.4.2.1 Agent Upgrade

  v3.4.2.1 introduced a bug that caused the browser monitor auto instrumentation (for RUM) default to be false. The correct value of true is now used

• When the Ruby Agent detects Unicorn as the dispatcher it creates an INFO level log message with additional information

  To help customers using Unicorn, if the agent detects it (Unicorn) is being used as the dispatcher an INFO level log message it created that includes a link to New Relic online doc that has additional steps that may be required to get performance data reporting.

• (Fix) In version 3.4.2 of the Ruby Agent the server side value for Apdex T was disregarded

  With version 3.4.2 of the agent, the value set in the newrelic.yml file took precedence over the value set in the New Relic UI. As of version 3.5.0 only the value for Apdex T set in the New Relic UI will be used. Any setting in the yaml file will be ignored.

• Improved Error Detection/Reporting capabilities for Rails 3 apps

  Some errors are missed by the agent's exception reporting handlers because they are generated in the rails stack, outside of the instrumented controller action. A Rack middleware is now included that can detect these errors as they bubble out of the middleware stack. Note that this does not include Routing Errors.

• The Ruby Agent now logs certain information it receives from the New Relic servers

  After connecting to the New Relic servers the agent logs the New Relic URL of the app it is reporting to.

• GC profiling overhead for Ruby 1.9 reduced

  For Ruby 1.9 the amount of time spent in GC profiling has been reduced.

• Know issue with Ruby 1.8.7-p334, sqlite3-ruby 1.3.0 or older, and resque 1.23.0

  The Ruby Agent will not work in conjunction with Ruby 1.8.7-p334, sqlite3-ruby 1.3.3 or earlier, and resque 1.23.0. Your app will likely stop functioning. This is a known problem with Ruby versions up to 1.8.7-p334. Upgrading to the last release of Ruby 1.8.7 is recommended. This issue has been present in every version of the agent we've tested going back for a year.

v3.4.2.1

• Fix issue when app_name is nil

  If the app_name setting ends up being nil an exception got generated and the application wouldn't run. This would notably occur when running a Heroku app locally without the NEW_RELIC_APP_NAME environment variable set. A nil app_name is now detected and an error logged specifying remediation.

v3.4.2

• The RUM NRAGENT tk value gets more robustly sanitized to prevent potential XSS vulnerabilities

  The code that scrubs the token used in Real User Monitoring has been enhanced to be more robust.

• Support for Apdex T in server side configuration

  For those using server side configuration the Ruby Agent now supports setting the Apdex T value via the New Relic UI.

• Refactoring of agent config code

  The code that reads the configuration information and configures the agent got substantially reorganized, consolidated, simplified, and made more robust.

v3.4.1

Bug Fixes

• Fix edge case in RUM auto instrumentation where X-UA-Compatible meta tag is present but tag is missing.

  There is a somewhat obscure edge case where RUM auto instrumentation will crash a request. The issue seems to be triggered when the X-UA-Compatible meta tag is present and the tag is missing.

• Fixed reference to @service.request_timeout to @request_timeout in new_relic_service.rb. (Thanks to Matthew Savage)

  When a timeout occurred during connection to the collector an "undefined method `request_timeout' for nil:NilClass'" would get raised.

• preserve visibility on traced methods.

  Aliased methods now have the same visibility as the original traced method. A couple of the esoteric methods created in the process weren't getting the visibility set properly.

• Agent service does not connect to directed shard collector after connecting to proxy

  After connecting to collector proxy name of real collector was updated, but ip address was not being updated causing connections to go to the proxy. Agent now looks up ip address for real collector.

• corrupt marshal data from pipe children crashing agent

  If the agent received corrupted data from the Resque worker child agent it could crash the agent itself. fixed.

• should reset RubyBench GC counter between polls

  On Ruby REE, the GC profiler does not reset the counter between polls. This is only a problem if GC could happen between transactions, as in, for example, out-of-band GC in Unicorn. fixed.

v3.4.0.1

• Prevent the agent from resolving the collector address when disabled.
• Fix for error collector configuration that was introduced during beta.
• Preserve method visibility when methods are traced with #add_method_tracer and #add_transaction_tracer

v3.4.0

• Major refactor of data transmission mechanism. This enabled child processes to send data to parent processes, which then send the data to the New Relic service. This should only affect Resque users, dramatically improving their experience.
• Moved Resque instrumentation from rpm_contrib to main agent. Resque users should discontinue use of rpm_contrib or upgrade to 2.1.11.
• Resolve issue with configuring the Error Collector when using server-side configuration.

v3.3.5

• [FIX] Allow tracing of methods ending in ! and ?
• [PERF] Give up after scanning first 50k of the response in RUM auto-instrumentation.
• [FIX] Don't raise when extracting metrics from SQL queries with non UTF-8 bytes.
• Replaced "Custom/DJ Locked Jobs" metric with new metrics for monitoring DelayedJob: queue_length, failed_jobs, and locked_jobs, all under Workers/DelayedJob. queue_length is also broken out by queue name or priority depending on the version of DelayedJob deployed.

v3.3.4.1

• Bug fix when rendering empty collection in Rails 3.1+

v3.3.4

• Rails 3 view instrumentation

v3.3.3

• Improved Sinatra instrumentation
• Limit the number of nodes collected in long running transactions to prevent leaking memory

v3.3.2.1

• [SECURITY] fix for cookie handling by End User Monitoring instrumentation

v3.3.2

• deployments recipe change: truncate git SHAs to 7 characters
• Fixes for obfuscation of PostgreSQL and SQLite queries
• Fix for lost database connections when using a forking framework
• Workaround for RedHat kernel bug which prevented blocking reads of /proc fs
• Do not trap signals when handling exceptions

v3.3.1

• improved Ruby 1.8.6 support
• fix for issues with RAILS_ROOT deprecation warnings
• fixed incorrect 1.9 GC time reporting
• obfuscation for Slow SQL queries respects transaction trace config
• fix for RUM instrumentation reporting bad timing info in some cases
• refactored ActiveRecord instrumentation, no longer requires Rails

v3.3.0

• fix for GC instrumentation when using Ruby 1.9
• new feature to correlate browser and server transaction traces
• new feature to trace slow sql statements
• fix to help cope with malformed rack responses
• do not try to instrument versions of ActiveMerchant that are too old

v3.2.0.1

• Updated LICENSE
• Updated links to support docs

v3.2.0

• Fix over-detection of mongrel and unicorn and only start the agent when actual server is running
• Improve developer mode backtraces to support ruby 1.9.2, windows
• Fixed some cases where Memcache instrumentation was failing to load
• Ability to set log destination by NEW_RELIC_LOG env var
• Fix to mutex lib load issue
• Performance enhancements (thanks to Jeremy Kemper)
• Fix overly verbose STDOUT message (thanks to Anselm Helbig)

v3.1.2

• Fixed some thread safety issues
• Work around for Ruby 1.8.7 Marshal crash bug
• Numerous community patches (Gabriel Horner, Bradley Harris, Diego Garcia, Tommy Sullivan, Greg Hazel, John Thomas Marino, Paul Elliott, Pan Thomakos)
• Fixed RUM instrumentation bug

v3.1.1

• Support for Rails 3.1 (thanks to Ben Hoskings via github)
• Support for Rubinius
• Fixed issues affecting some Delayed Job users where log files were not appearing
• Fixed an issue where some instrumentation might not get loaded in Rails apps
• Fix for memcached cas method (thanks to Andrew Long and Joseph Palermo )
• Fix for logger deprecation warning (thanks to Jonathan del Strother via github)
• Support for logging to STDOUT
• Support for Spymemcached client on jruby

v3.1.0

• Support for aggregating data from short-running processes to reduce reporting overhead
• Numerous bug fixes
• Increased unit test coverage

v3.0.1

• Updated Real User Monitoring to reduce javascript size and improve compatibility, fix a few known bugs

v3.0.0

• Support for Real User Monitoring
• Back end work on internals to improve reliability
• added a 'log_file_name' and 'log_file_path' configuration variable to allow setting the path and name of the agent log file
• Improve reliability of statistics calculations
• Remove some previously deprecated methods
• Remove Sequel instrumentation pending more work

v2.14.1

• Avoid overriding methods named 'log' when including the MethodTracer module
• Ensure that all load paths for 'new_relic/agent' go through 'new_relic/control' first
• Remove some debugging output from tests

v2.14.0

• Dependency detection framework to prevent multi-loading or early-loading of instrumentation files

v2.13.5

• Moved the API helper to the github newrelic_api gem.
• Revamped queue time to include server, queue, and middleware time
• Increased test coverage and stability
• Add Trinidad as a dispatcher (from Calavera, on github)
• Sequel instrumentation from Aman Gupta
• patches to 1.9 compatibility from dkastner on github
• Support for 1.9.2's garbage collection instrumentation from Justin Weiss
• On Heroku, existing queue time headers will be detected
• Fix rack constant scoping in dev mode for 1.9 (Rack != ::Rack)
• Fixes for instrumentation loading failing on Exception classes that are not subclasses of StandardError
• Fix active record instrumentation load order for Rails 3

v2.13.4

• Update DNS lookup code to remove hardcoded IP addresses

v2.13.3

• Dalli instrumentation from Mike Perham (thanks Mike)
• Datamapper instrumentation from Jordan Ritter (thanks Jordan)
• Apdex now defaults to 0.5 !!! Please be aware that if you are not setting an apdex, !!! this will cause a change in the apparent performance of your app.
• Make metric hashes threadsafe (fixes problems sending metrics in Jruby threaded code)
• Delete obsolete links to metric docs in developer mode
• Detect gems when using Bundler
• Fix newrelic_ignore in Rails 3
• Break metric parser into a separate vendored gem
• When using Unicorn, preload_app: true is recommended to get proper after_fork behavior.

v2.13.2

• Remove a puts. Yes, a whole release for a puts.

v2.13.1

• Add missing require in rails 3 framework control

v2.13.0

• developer mode is now a rack middleware and can be used on any framework; it is no longer supported automatically on versions of Rails prior to 2.3; see README for details
• memcache key recording for transaction traces
• use system_timer gem if available, fall back to timeout lib
• address instability issues in JRuby 1.2
• renamed executable 'newrelic_cmd' to 'newrelic'; old name still supported for backward compatibility
• added 'newrelic install' command to install a newrelic.yml file in the current directory
• optimization to execution time measurement
• optimization to startup sequence
• change startup sequence so that instrumentation is installed after all other gems and plugins have loaded
• add option to override automatic flushing of data on exit--send_data_on_exit defaults to 'true'
• ignored errors no longer affect apdex score
• added record_transaction method to the api to allow recording details from web and background transactions occurring outside RPM
• fixed a bug related to enabling a gold trial / upgrade not sending transaction traces correctly

v2.12.3

• fix regression in startup sequence

v2.12.2

• fix for regression in Rails 2.1 inline rendering
• workaround bug found in some rubies that caused a segv and/or NoMemoryError when deflating content for upload
• avoid creating connection thread in unicorn/passenger spawners

v2.12.1

• fix bug in profile mode
• fix race condition in Delayed::Job instrumentation loading
• fix glassfish detection in latest glassfish gem

v2.12.0

• support basic instrumentation for ActsAsSolr and Sunspot

v2.11.3

• fix bug in startup when running JRuby

v2.11.2

• fix for unicorn not reporting when the proc line had 'master' in it
• fix regression for passenger 2.0 and earlier
• fix after_fork in the shim

v2.11.1

• republished gem without generated rdocs

v2.11.0

• rails3 instrumentation (no developer mode support yet)
• removed the ensure_worker_thread started and instead defined an after_fork handler that will set up the agent properly in forked processes.
• change at_exit handler so the shutdown always goes after other shutdown handlers
• add visibility to active record db transactions in the rpm transaction traces (thanks to jeremy kemper)
• fix regression in merb support which caused merb apps not to start
• added NewRelic::Agent.logger to the public api to write to the agent log file.
• optimizations to background thread, controller instrumentation, memory usage
• add logger method to public_api
• support list notation for ignored exceptions in the newrelic.yml

v2.10.8

• fix bug in delayed_job instrumentation that caused the job queue sampler to run in the wrong place
• change startup sequence and code that restarts the worker loop thread
• detect the unicorn master and dont start the agent; hook in after_fork
• fix problem with the Authlogic metric names which caused errors in developer mode. Authlogic metrics now adhere to the convention of prefixing the name with 'Custom'
• allow more correct overriding of transaction trace settings in the call to #manual_start
• simplify WorkerLoop and add better protection for concurrency
• preliminary support for rails3

v2.10.6

• fix missing URL and referrer on some traced errors and transactions
• gather traced errors after executing the rescue chain in ActionController
• always load controller instrumentation
• pick up token validation from newrelic.yml

v2.10.5

• fix bug in delayed_job instrumentation occurring when there was no DJ log

v2.10.4

• fix incompatibility with Capistrano 2.5.16
• strip down URLs reported in transactions and errors to path only

v2.10.3

• optimization to reduce overhead: move background samplers into foreground thread
• change default config file to ignore RoutingErrors
• moved the background task instrumentation into a separate tab in the RPM UI
• allow override of the RPM application name via NEWRELIC_APP_NAME environment variable
• revised Delayed::Job instrumentation so no manual_start is required
• send buffered data on shutdown
• expanded support for queue length and queue time
• remove calls to starts_with to fix Sinatra and non-rails deployments
• fix problem with apdex scores recording too low in some circumstances
• switch to jeweler for gem building
• minor fixes, test improvements, doc and rakefile improvements
• fix incompatibility with Hoptoad where Hoptoad was not getting errors handled by New Relic
• many other optimizations, bug fixes and documentation improvements

v2.10.2.

• beta release of 2.10
• fix bugs with Sinatra app instrumentation
• minor doc updates

v2.10.1.

• alpha release of 2.10
• rack support, including metal; ignores 404s; requires a module inclusion (see docs)
• sinatra support, displays actions named by the URI pattern matched
• add API method to abort transaction recording for in-flight transactions
• remove account management calls from newrelic_api.rb
• truncating extremely large transaction traces for efficiency
• fix error reporting in recipes; add newrelic_rails_env option to recipes to override the rails env used to pull the app_name out of newrelic.yml
• added TorqueBox recognition (thanks Bob McWhirter)
• renamed config settings: enabled => monitor_mode; developer => developer_mode; old names will still work in newrelic.yml
• instrumentation for DelayedJob (thanks Travis Tilley)
• added config switches to turn off certain instrumentation when you aren't interested in the metrics, to save on overhead--see newrelic.yml for details.
• add profiling support to dev mode; very experimental!
• add 'multi_threaded' config option to indicate when the app is running multi-threaded, so we can disable some instrumentation
• fix test failures in JRuby, REE
• improve Net::HTTP instrumentation so it's more efficient and distinguishes calls between web and non-web transactions.
• database instrumentation notices all database commands in addition to the core commands
• add support for textmate to dev mode
• added add_transaction_tracer method to support instrumenting methods as if they were web transactions; this will facilitate better visibility of background tasks and eventually things like rack, metal and Sinatra
• adjusted apdex scores to reflect time spent in the mongrel queue
• fixed incompatibility with JRuby on startup
• implemented CPU measure for JRuby which reflects the cpu burn for all controller actions (does not include background tasks)
• fixed scope issue with GC instrumentation, subtracting time from caller
• added # of GC calls to GC instrumentation
• renamed the dispatcher metric
• refactored stats_engine code for readability
• optimization: reduce wakeup times for harvest thread

v2.10.0.

• alpha release of 2.10
• support unicorn
• instrumentation of GC for REE and MRE with GC patch
• support agent restarting when changes are made to the account
• removed #newrelic_notice_error from Object class, replaced by NewRelic::Agent#notice_error
• collect histogram statistics
• add custom parameters to newrelic_notice_error call to display extra info for errors
• add method disable_all_tracing(&block) to execute a block without capturing metrics
• newrelic_ignore now blocks all instrumentation collection for the specified actions
• added doc to method_tracer API and removed second arg requirement for add_method_tracer call
• instrumentation for Net::HTTP
• remove method_tracer shim to avoid timing problems in monitoring daemons
• for non-rails daemons, look at APP_ROOT and NRCONFIG env vars for custom locations

v2.9.9.

• Disable at_exit handler for Unicorn which sometimes caused the agent to stop reporting immediately.

v2.9.8.

• add instrumentation for Net::HTTP calls, to show up as "External"
• added support for validating agents in the cloud.
• recognize Unicorn dispatcher
• add NewRelic module definitions to ActiveRecord instrumentation

v2.9.5.

• Snow Leopard memory fix

v2.9.4.

• clamp size of data sent to server
• reset statistics for passenger when forking to avoid erroneous data
• fix problem deserializing errors from the server
• fix incompatibility with postgres introduced in 2.9.

v2.9.3.

• fix startup failure in Windows due to memory sampler
• add JRuby environment information

v2.9.2.

• change default apdex_t to 0.5 seconds
• fix bug in deployments introduced by multi_homed setting
• support overriding the log in the agent api
• fix JRuby problem using objectspace
• display custom parameters when looking at transactions in dev mode
• display count of sql statements on the list of transactions in dev mode
• fixes for merb--thanks to Carl Lerche

v2.9.1.

• add newrelic_ignore_apdex method to controller classes to allow you to omit some actions from apdex statistics
• Add hook for Passenger shutdown events to get more timely shutdown notices; this will help in more accurate memory readings in Passenger
• add newrelic_notice_error to Object class
• optional ability to verify SSL certificates, note that this has some performance and reliability implications
• support multi-homed host with multiple apps running on duplicate ports

v2.9.0.

Noteworthy Enhancements

• give visibility to templates and partials in Rails 2.1 and later, in dev mode and production
• change active record metrics to capture statistics in adapter log() call, resulting in lower overhead and improved visibility into different DB operations; only AR operations that are not hitting the query cache will be measured to avoid overhead
• added mongrel_rpm to the gem, a standalone daemon listening for custom metric values sent from local processes (experimental); do mongrel_rpm --help
• add API for system monitoring daemons (refer to KB articles); changed API for manual starting of the agent; refer to NewRelic::Agent.manual_start for details
• do certificate verification on ssl connections to collector.newrelic.com
• support instances appearing in more than one application by allowing a semicolon separated list of names for the newrelic.yml app_name setting.
• combined agent logfiles into a single logfile
• use rpm server time for transaction traces rather than agent time

Developer Mode (only) Enhancements

• show partial rendering in traces
• improved formatting of metric names in traces
• added number of queries to transactions in the transaction list
• added some sorting options for the transaction list
• added a page showing the list of active threads

Compatibility Enhancements

• ruby 1.9.1 compatibility
• support concurrency when determining busy times, for 2.2 compatibility
• in jruby, use Java used heap for memory sampling if the system memory is not accessible from an unsupported platform
• jruby will no longer start the agent now when running the console or rake tasks
• API support for RPM as a footnote add-in
• webrick support restored

Noteworthy bugfixes

• sample memory on linux by reading /proc/#{$$}/status file
• fixed ambiguous 'View' metrics showing up in controller breakdown
• removed Numeric extensions, including round_to, and to_ms
• using a different timeout mechanism when we post data to RPM
• remove usage of Rails::Info which had a side effect of enabling ActiveRecord even when it wasn't an active framework
• moved CPU sampler off background thread and onto the harvest thread
• tests now run cleanly in any rails app using test:newrelic or test:plugins

Agent improvements to support future RPM enhancements

• add instrumentation to capture metrics on response codes; not yet working in rails 2.3.*
• added http referrer to traced errors
• capture gem requirements from rails
• capture cpu utilization adjusted for processor count
• transaction sampling

v2.8.10.

• fix thin support with rails 2.3.2 when using script/server
• fix incompatibility with rails 2.3.2 and script/server options processing
• minor tweak to environment gathering for gem mode

v2.8.9.

• fix problem finding the newrelic controller in dev mode
• fix incompatibility with older versions of optparse
• fix potential jvm problem with jruby
• remove test:all task definition to avoid conflicts
• change error message about window sampler in windows not supported to a warning message

v2.8.8.

• fix error with jruby on windows
• fix problem where webrick was being incorrectly detected causing some problems with mongrel application assignments--had to disable webrick for now

v2.8.7.

• fix for ssl connection hanging problems
• fix problem recognizing mongrel in rails 2.3.2
• fastcgi support in rails 2.3.2
• put back webrick support

v2.8.6.

• fix for capture_params when using file uploads in controller actions
• use pure ruby NS lookup for collector host to eliminate possibly blocking applications

v2.8.5.

• fix reference to CommandError which was breaking some cap scripts
• fix incompatibility with Rails 2.0 in the server API
• fix problem with litespeed with Lite accounts
• fix problem when ActiveRecord is disabled
• moved merb instrumentation to Merb::Controller instead of AbstractController to address incompatibility with MailController
• fix problem in devmode displaying sql with embedded urls

v2.8.4.

• fix bug in capistrano recipe causing cap commands to fail with error about not finding Version class

v2.8.3.

• refactor unit tests so they will run in a generic rails environment
• require classes in advance to avoid autoloading. this is to address incompatibilities with desert as well as more flexibility in gem initialization
• fixed newrelic_helper.rb 1.9 incompatibility

v2.8.2.

• fix Ruby 1.9 syntax compatibility errors
• update the class loading sanity check, will notify server of errors
• fix agent output on script and rake task execution

v2.8.1.

• Convert the deployment information upload script to an executable and put in the bin directory. When installed as a gem this command is symlinked to /usr/bin. Usage: newrelic_cmd deployments --help
• Fix issue invoking api when host is not set in newrelic.yml
• Fix deployments api so it will work from a gem
• Fix thin incompatibility in developer mode

v2.8.0.

• add beta of api in new_relic_api.rb
• instrumented dynamic finders in ActiveRecord
• preliminary support for capturing deployment information via capistrano
• change memory sampler for solaris to use /usr/bin/ps
• allow ERB in newrelic.yml file
• merged support for merb into this version
• fix incompatibility in the developer mode with the safe_erb plugin
• fix module namespace issue causing an error accessing NewRelic::Instrumentation modules
• fix issue where the agent sometimes failed to start-up if there was a transient network problem
• fix IgnoreSilentlyException message

v2.7.4.

• fix error when trying to serialize some kinds of Enumerable objects
• added extra debug logging
• added app_name to app mapping

v2.7.3.

• fix compatibility issue with 1.8.5 causing error with Dir.glob

v2.7.2.

• fix problem with passenger edge not being a detected environment

v2.7.1.

• fix problem with skipped dispatcher instrumentation

v2.7.0.

• Repackage to support both plugin and Gem installation
• Support passenger/litespeed/jruby application naming
• Update method for calculating dispatcher queue time
• Show stack traces in RPM Transaction Traces
• Capture error source for TemplateErrors
• Clean up error stack traces.
• Support query plans from postgres
• Performance tuning
• bugfixes

v2.5.3.

• fix error in transaction tracing causing traces not to show up

v2.5.2.

• fixes for postgres explain plan support

v2.5.1.

• bugfixes

v2.5.0.

• add agent support for rpm 1.1 features
• Fix regression error with thin support

v2.4.3.

• added 'newrelic_ignore' controller class method with :except and :only options for finer grained control over the blocking of instrumentation in controllers.
• bugfixes

v2.4.2.

• error reporting in early access

v2.4.1.

• bugfix: initializing developer mode

v2.4.0.

• Beta support for LiteSpeed and Passenger

v2.3.7.

• bugfixes

v2.3.6.

• bugfixes

v2.3.5.

• bugfixes: pie chart data, rails 1.1 compatibility

v2.3.4.

• bugfix

v2.3.3.

• bugfix for non-mysql databases

v2.3.2.

• bugfixes
• Add enhancement for Transaction Traces early access feature

v2.3.1.

• bugfixes

v2.3.0.

• Add support for Transaction Traces early access feature

v2.2.2.

• bugfixes

v2.2.1.

• Add rails 2.1 support for Developer Mode
• Changes to memory sampler: Add support for JRuby and fix Solaris support.

• Stop catching exceptions and start catching StandardError; other exception cleanup
• Add protective exception catching to the stats engine
• Improved support for thin domain sockets
• Support JRuby environments

v2.1.6.

• bugfixes

v2.1.5.

• bugfixes

v2.1.4.

• bugfixes

v2.1.3.

• bugfixes

v2.1.2.

• bugfixes

v2.1.1.

• bugfixes

v2.1.0.

• release for private beta