New features
Support for End User Originated Spans in Distributed Tracing
New Relic now supports end-to-end distributed tracing with this release. For our Browser & APM Pro customers, you can now enable the Browser spans for any app that uses our Browser Pro + SPA agent.
This MVP includes support for same-origin AJAX requests that originate during a BrowserInteraction event. This AJAX request will be listed as the root entry span for a trace.
Learn More
- For more details about APM & Browser agent version requirements and enablement, see our Browser Data in Distributed Tracing Page. Please note that not all APM agents are supported at this time.
- For more details about all supported Span attributes, visit our Event Data Dictionary
Known Issues
- Enabling Browser in Distributed Tracing for use with current versions of these language agents, Java, PHP, and C, will result in disconnected traces (single span traces for all Browser requests) and potentially the loss of APM transaction traces and spans. Please see the APM compatibility requirements for supported versions and estimated release dates.
New PageViewTiming Event to capture User Centric Perceived Performance metrics in real time
With this release, we are tying together the visual and responsiveness performance for our customer's site. With every page view, the agent is now capturing the time of the first interaction along with FID (First Input Delay). The existing paint timing metrics (First Paint and First Contentful Paint) are now collected even when they occur after the load event. All of these new metrics are captured on the new PageViewTiming events, available in Insights. This new event type is available for all agents, but requires a Browser Pro subscription.
Visit our New Relic Event Data Dictionary for a list of attributes and more details about the PageViewTiming event.
First Interaction
First Interaction timing captures the moment in time that a user first engages with a site. Within this timing, we also capture the type of interaction (click, key, mousedown, etc). This timing represents the first step in calculating the First Input Delay, which is the time from First Interaction to the moment that the site responds (is interactive).
First Input Delay
FID is a metric that tracks the delay between the time a user can attempt to interact with a part of the site (for example, when they click a link, tap on a button, or use a custom, JavaScript-powered control), and the time that the interface is able to respond to that interaction. We have all experienced situations where a webpage has visibly loaded, but when we try to click around on buttons or any JavaScript-powered interactive elements, nothing responds. This delay is what the FID metric tracks.
The FID metric is in some ways an intersection of the First Contentful Paint and Time to Interactive metrics. It lies in the middle of those two points, measuring the time between the FCP (and therefore when a first input can be made) and when the browser’s main thread is able to respond to any interactions. One major point of FID that differentiates it from Time to Interactive is that it requires a user to interact! TTI can be calculated without user input, so it is somewhat less powerful in the sense that it isn't providing any new information about my user's active experience or frustration, we can only assume that slow = bad. Why only consider the first input
Learn more
- For more information and query examples, see our PageViewTiming event documentation.
- For more information about the Paint Timing browser compatibility, see the Browser compatibility and requirements documentation.
- For more information about User-Centric Perceived Performance metrics, visit the Google Developers Web Fundamentals Guides on Performance.
- For more information about the difference between FID and TTI, see When Users Click: Tracking First Input Delay
Improvements
- Browser interactions now wait on external scripts to finish loading: Browser interactions measure the time of all Javascript code that runs as a result of an interaction. The agent now includes the time it takes to load and execute external scripts. This is useful, for example, when the code started by an interaction must be loaded first (lazy loading).
How to upgrade
To upgrade your agent to the latest version, see Upgrade the Browser agent.