Python agent v2.26.0.22

Notes

This release of the Python agent includes improvements to browser monitoring, with the primary change being that the Python agent is now able to perform automatic browser monitoring for a wider range of Python web frameworks running on a traditional WSGI server. This includes popular web frameworks such as Flask, Pyramid and Bottle.

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

• Prior to this version, automatic browser monitoring for HTML pages served up by a Python web application was only available if using the Django web framework. With this release this capability has now been expanded in most cases to cover any Python web framework being hosted on top of a web server with a direct interface for hosting Python WSGI applications. WSGI servers this covers include the popular Python web hosting packages Apache/mod_wsgi, gunicorn and uWSGI. Support does however not currently extend to Python web hosting mechanisms which provide a bridge to a WSGI application from a native Python web application API, such as is the case if using the Tornado or Twisted WSGI containers.

  What the change means is that if using a previously unsupported web framework such as Flask, Pyramid or Bottle, and you were not manually instrumenting your HTML page responses to make use of browser monitoring, you will now start to see automatically end user performance metrics being captured and displayed in the New Relic APM UI. You will also have access to the optionally enabled browser monitoring agent, enabling access to details of AJAX calls made by your pages and also the details of any client side Javascript errors which might have been raised.

  If you were previously manually instrumenting your HTML page responses to enable browser monitoring, you should in most cases now be able to discontinue such manual instrumentation.

  Note that at this time, in addition to lack of support for Tornado and Twisted WSGI containers, we do still have a few restrictions in place which mean we may not always be able to enable automatic browser monitoring support. The key restriction is that when using a web framework, the automatic support for browser monitoring will be disabled if you are using a middleware or plugin for the framework, which performs compression of responses, or which otherwise modifies the content encoding for the response. For example, automatic browser monitoring will still not be available if using the flask.ext.compress plugin with Flask, or the paste.gzipper middleware with any WSGI application. We are working on extending coverage to cases where such middleware or plugins are being employed, but if you are using them, for now you will still need to resort to manually instrumenting your responses to enable browser monitoring. The only exception to this is the Django web framework, where we already previously had support for automatic browser monitoring even if the Django GZipMiddleware was being used.

  For further details on the updated browser monitoring support and manually instrumenting your HTML page responses, see our documentation on page load timing when using the Python agent. If browser monitoring support is not currently enabled for your application or you need to disable it, then see our documentation on browser settings.

Bug fixes/Improvements

• The agent was in some cases incorrectly inserting our instrumentation to HTML page responses which were marked as an attachment by way of a Content-Disposition HTTP response header or HTML page meta tag.