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.

Support statement

New Relic recommends that you upgrade the agent regularly and at a minimum every 3 months. As of this release, the oldest supported version is 5.2.0.345.

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, diagnosiing 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. We do not know of code changes that would prevent the agent from continuing to work with these releases. 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 (also known as 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's a known issue that some external gems lead to Stack Level too Deep exceptions when prepend and method-chaining are mixed. In such known cases, the 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. Sinatra 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 startup 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 segment length resulting in an exception when attempting to nest the initial segment which does not exist.

Support statement

New Relic recommends that you upgrade the agent regularly and at a minimum every 3 months. As of this release, the oldest supported version is 4.8.0.

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 attempting to calll descendant_complete on a nil object. This is fixed to protect against calling the descendant_complete in these 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. This sends any locally cached data to the New Relic collector before the application shuts down. This is useful 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.

• Infinite tracing adds additional data to connection metadata

  Adds data from the agents connect response request_headers_map to the metadata for the connection to the infinite trace observer.

Support statement

New Relic recommends that you upgrade the agent regularly and at a minimum every 3 months. As of this release, the oldest supported version is 4.8.0.

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 erroneousy 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 repoducible 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 programatically. 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 falsly 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.

Support Statement

New Relic recommends that you upgrade the agent regularly and at a minimum every 3 months. As of this release, the oldest supported version is 4.5.0.

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

  Copier

  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!

New Relic Ruby Agent Release Notes

v6.12.0

• The New Relic Ruby agent is now open source under the Apache 2 license and you can now observe the project roadmap. 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 Spans

  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 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.

New Relic Ruby Agent Release Notes

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 CAT 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.

• Bugfix: Environment Report now supports Rails >= 6.1

  The API changed for how database connections are accessed in Rails versions starting with 6.1 to support multiple database feature. The Environment report was enhanced to use the Rails >= 6.1 API with fallback to old API when that fails.

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

• Added distributed tracing to Sidekiq jobs

  Thanks to andreaseger for the contribution!

New Relic Ruby Agent Release Notes

• 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.