Ruby agent release notesRSS

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.

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 New Relic on 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.

Adding rake spec tasks to your deny list

A deny list helps the agent avoid starting during rake tasks. Some default RSpec tasks were missing. Thanks for the contribution Kohei Hasegawa!

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 https://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!

Percentiles and Histograms

The Ruby Agent now captures data that provides percentile and histogram views in the New Relic UI.

Missing Resque transaction traces

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.

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.

3.6.8.164 introduced a potential memory leak when transmission of some kinds of data to New Relic servers failed. 3.6.8.168 fixes this.

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.

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!

Additional locking option for Resque

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

HTTP initialization in the agent lacked an appropriate timeout, leading to dropouts in reporting under certain network error conditions.

Unnecessary requests from Resque jobs

An issue causing Resque jobs to unnecessarily make requests against New Relic servers was fixed.

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.

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!

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.

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.