Important
The end-of-life date for this agent version is July 29, 2019. To update to the latest agent version, see Update the agent. For more information, see End-of-life policy.
Notes
This release of the Python agent includes improved instrumentation for the Bottle framework and new instrumentation support for gevent WSGI servers. It also allows reporting of data to multiple applications in New Relic to be specified via an environment variable, in addition to the existing 'app_name' setting in the agent configuration file.
The agent can be installed using easy_install/pip/distribute via the Python Package Index or can be downloaded directly from our download site.
For a list of known issues with the Python agent see our online help article on the status of the Python agent.
New Features:
- Provide automatic instrumentation of the WSGI application entry point when using the 'gevent.wsgi' and 'gevent.pywsgi' servers. This means that if you are not using a web framework we already support and instrument, are using a WSGI component library, or implementing your WSGI application from scratch, it is no longer necessary to wrap the WSGI application entry point with our special decorator or wrappers when using the gevent WSGI servers.
Features Changed:
- Previously it was only possible to list multiple applications in New Relic to report data to via the 'app_name' setting in the agent configuration file. Attempting to list multiple application names (separated by the requisite semi colon), in the 'NEW_RELIC_APP_NAME' environment variable was ignored with the complete value (including semi colons), being used as the application name. This limitation has now been lifted and a list of applications to report to can now be specified using the 'NEW_RELIC_APP_NAME' environment variable.
Bug fixes/Improvements:
- The instrumentation for the Bottle web framework has been improved. The changes include the request handler now being broken out properly as a separate item in the transaction breakdown, the web transaction being named after an error handler when appropriate and requests which could not be mapped to a request handler being named as being a 404 if no error handler was provided. Handling of exceptions for HTTP errors has also been improved and are now being correctly matched against our internal list of HTTP status codes to be ignored as exceptions. Previously the instrumentation was too liberally ignoring all HTTP error exceptions.
- When using the Flask web framework, a NotFound exception raised within the underlying Werkzeug library was not being ignored. It is now no longer necessary to explicitly ignore the exception type 'werkzeug.exceptions:NotFound' in the agent configuration.
- When an unhanded exception was raised by a Pylons application, a bug in the implementation of the agent's error trace wrappers would cause a subsequent exception to be raised from the agent itself, masking the details of the original exception.
- When trying to determine how much memory was available on a system, the agent would fallback to trying to the use the 'psutil' module, if installed, if our standard ways of checking failed. This would cause the agent to fail on a PaaS such as PythonAnyWhere, which prohibits access to the /proc filesystem. Use of 'psutil' as a fallback has now been removed to avoid any potential for a failure.
- The version of the bundled 'requests' module the agent used to perform HTTP requests to our data collector did not work with Python 2.6.2 or older. A fix to 'urllib3' used by the 'requests' module has been back ported to address the issue.
- Our updated database instrumentation wrappers released in the last agent version, would incorrectly return that a database connection or cursor object were callable. This could confuse code which was trying to introspect those objects to perform traversal in order to get access to inner details of the implementation of the database modules.