Ruby agent release notesRSS

Rack middleware instrumentation

The Ruby agent now automatically instruments Rack middlewares!

This means that the agent can now give you a more complete picture of your application's response time, including time spent in middleware. It also means that requests which previously weren't captured by the agent because they never made it to the bottom of your middleware stack (usually a Rails or Sinatra application) will now be captured.

After installing this version of the Ruby agent, you'll see a new 'Middleware' band on your application's overview graph, and individual middlewares will appear in transaction breakdown charts and transaction traces.

The agent can instrument middlewares that are added from a config.ru file via Rack::Builder, or via Rails' middleware stack in Rails 3.0+.

This instrumentation may be disabled with the disable_middlware_instrumentation configuration setting.

For more details, see the documentation for this feature:

• http://docs.newrelic.com/docs/ruby/rack-middlewares
• http://docs.newrelic.com/docs/ruby/middleware-upgrade-changes

Capistrano 3.x support

Recording application deployments using Capistrano 3.x is now supported.

Many thanks to Jennifer Page for the contribution!

Better support for Sidekiq's Delayed extensions

Sidekiq jobs executed via the Delayed extensions (e.g. the #delay method) will now be named after the actual class that #delay was invoked against, and will have their job arguments correctly captured if the sidekiq.capture_params configuration setting is enabled.

Many thanks to printercu for the contribution!

Improved Apdex calculation with ignored error classes

Previously, a transaction resulting in an exception that bubbled up to the top level would always be counted as failing for the purposes of Apdex calculations (unless the transaction name was ignored entirely). Now, exceptions whose classes have been ignored by the error_collector.ignore_errors configuration setting will not cause a transaction to be automatically counted as failing.

Allow URIs that are not parseable by stdlib's URI if addressable is present

There are some URIs that are valid by RFC 3986, but not parseable by Ruby's stdlib URI class. The Ruby agent will now attempt to use the addressable gem to parse URIs if it is present, allowing requests against these problematic URIs to be instrumented.

Many thanks to Craig R Webster and Amir Yalon for their help with this issue!

More robust error collection from Resque processes

Previously, traced errors where the exception class was defined in the Resque worker but not in the Resque master process would not be correctly handled by the agent. This has been fixed.

Allow Sinatra apps to set the New Relic environment without setting RACK_ENV

The NEW_RELIC_ENV environment variable may now be used to specify the environment the agent should use from its configuration file, independently of RACK_ENV.

Many thanks to Mario Izquierdo for the contribution!

Better error handling in Browser Application Monitoring injection

The agent middleware that injects the JavaScript code necessary for Browser Application Monitoring now does a better job of catching errors that might occur during the injection process.

Allow disabling of Net::HTTP instrumentation

Most instrumentation in the Ruby agent can be disabled easily via a configuration setting. Our Net::HTTP instrumentation was previously an exception, but now it can also be disabled with the disable_net_http configuration setting.

Make Rails constant presence check more defensive

The Ruby agent now guards against the (rare) case where an application has a Rails constant defined, but no Rails::VERSION constant (because Rails is not actually present).

Many thanks to Vladimir Kiselev for the contribution!

Better handling for Rack applications implemented as middlewares

When using a Sinatra application as a middleware around another app (for example, a Rails app), or manually instrumenting a Rack middleware wrapped around another application, the agent would previously generate two separate transaction names in the New Relic UI (one for the middleware, and one for the inner application).

As of this release, the agent will instead unify these two parts into a single transaction in the UI. The unified name will be the name assigned to the inner-most traced transaction by default. Calls to NewRelic::Agent.set_transaction_name will continue to override the default names assigned by the agent's instrumentation code.

This change also makes it possible to run X-Ray sessions against transactions of the 'inner' application in cases where one instrumented app is wrapped in another that's implemented as a middleware.

Support for mongo-1.10.0

The Ruby agent now instruments version 1.10.0 of the mongo gem (versions 1.8.x and 1.9.x were already supported, and continue to be).

Allow setting configuration file path via an option to manual_start

Previously, passing the :config_path option to NewRelic::Agent.manual_start would not actually affect the location that the agent would use to look for its configuration file. This has been fixed, and the log messages emitted when a configuration file is not found should now be more helpful.

Better support for forking and daemonizing dispatchers (e.g. Puma, Unicorn)

The agent should now work out-of-the box with no special configuration on servers that fork or daemonize themselves (such as Unicorn or Puma in some configurations). The agent's background thread will be automatically restarted after the first transaction processed within each child process.

This change means it's no longer necessary to set the 'restart_thread_in_children setting' in your agent configuration file if you were doing so previously.

Rails 4.1 support

Rails 4.1 has shipped, and the Ruby agent is ready for it! We've been running our test suites against the release candidates with no significant issues, so we're happy to announce full compatibility with this new release of Rails.

Ruby VM measurements

The Ruby agent now records more detailed information about the performance and behavior of the Ruby VM, mainly focused around Ruby's garbage collector. This information is exposed on the new 'Ruby VM' tab in the UI. For details about what is recorded, see:

http://docs.newrelic.com/docs/ruby/ruby-vm-stats

Separate in-transaction GC timings for web and background processes

Previously, an application with GC instrumentation enabled, and both web and background processes reporting in to it would show an overly inflated GC band on the application overview graph, because data from both web and non-web transactions would be included. This has been fixed, and GC time during web and non-web transactions is now tracked separately.

More accurate GC measurements on multi-threaded web servers

The agent could previously have reported inaccurate GC times on multi-threaded web servers such as Puma. It will now correctly report GC timings in multi-threaded contexts.

Improved ActiveMerchant instrumentation

The agent will now trace the store, unstore, and update methods on ActiveMerchant gateways. In addition, a bug preventing ActiveMerchant instrumentation from working on Ruby 1.9+ has been fixed.

Thanks to Troex Nevelin for the contribution!

More robust Real User Monitoring script injection with charset meta tags

Previous versions of the agent with Real User Monitoring enabled could have injected JavaScript code into the page above a charset meta tag. By the HTML5 spec, the charset tag must appear in the first 1024 bytes of the page, so the Ruby agent will now attempt to inject RUM script after a charset tag, if one is present.

More robust connection sequence with New Relic servers

A rare bug that could cause the agent's initial connection handshake with New Relic servers to silently fail has been fixed, and better logging has been added to the related code path to ease diagnosis of any future issues.

Prevent over-counting of queue time with nested transactions

When using add_transaction_tracer on methods called from within a Rails or Sinatra action, it was previously possible to get inflated queue time measurements, because queue time would be recorded for both the outer transaction (the Rails or Sinatra action) and the inner transaction (the method given to add_transaction_tracer). This has been fixed, so only the outermost transaction will now record queue time.

Fix for Puma 2.8.0 cluster mode (3.7.3.204)

Puma's 2.8.0 release renamed a hook New Relic used to support Puma's cluster mode. This resulted in missing data for users running Puma. Thanks Benjamin Kudria for the fix!

Fix for deployment command bug (3.7.3.204)

Problems with file loading order could result in newrelic deployments failing with an unrecognized command error. This has been fixed.

Obfuscation for PostgreSQL explain plans

Fixes an agent bug with PostgreSQL where parameters from the original query could appear in explain plans sent to New Relic servers, even when SQL obfuscation was enabled. Parameters from the query are now masked in explain plans prior to transmission when transaction_tracer.record_sql is set to 'obfuscated' (the default setting).

For more information, see: https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/traces/security-for-postgresql-explain-plans

More accurate categorization of SQL statements

Some SQL SELECT statements that were previously being mis-categorized as 'SQL - OTHER' will now correctly be tagged as 'SQL - SELECT'. This particularly affected ActiveRecord users using PostgreSQL.

More reliable Typhoeus instrumentation

Fixed an issue where an exception raised from a user-specified on_complete block would cause our Typhoeus instrumentation to fail to record the request.

Update gem signing cert (3.7.2.195)

The certificate used to sign newrelic_rpm expired in February. This patch updates that for clients installing with verification.

Mongo instrumentation improvements

Users of the 'mongo' MongoDB client gem will get more detailed instrumentation including support for some operations that were not previously captured, and separation of aggregate metrics for web transactions from background jobs.

An issue with ensure_index when passed a symbol or string was also fixed. Thanks Maxime RETY for the report!

More accurate error tracing in Rails 4

Traced errors in Rails 4 applications will now be correctly associated with the transaction they occurred in, and custom attributes attached to the transaction will be correctly attached to the traced error as well.

More accurate partial-rendering metrics for Rails 4

View partials are now correctly treated as sub-components of the containing template render in Rails 4 applications, meaning that the app server breakdown graphs for Rails 4 transactions should be more accurate and useful.

Improved Unicorn 4.8.0 compatibility

A rare issue that could lead to spurrious traced errors on app startup for applications using Unicorn 4.8.0 has been fixed.

meta_request gem compatibility

An incompatibility with the meta_request gem has been fixed.

Typhoeus 0.6.4+ compatibility

A potential crash with Typhoeus 0.6.4+ when passing a URI object instead of a String instance to one of Typhoeus's HTTP request methods has been fixed.

Sequel single threaded mode fix

The agent will no longer attempt to run EXPLAIN queries for slow SQL statements issued using the Sequel gem in single-threaded mode, since doing so could potentially cause crashes.

Additional functionality for add_custom_parameters

Calling add_custom_parameters adds parameters to the system codenamed Rubicon. For more information, see http://newrelic.com/software-analytics

Correct first reported metric timespan for forking dispatchers (3.7.1.188)

The first time a newly-forked process (in some configurations) reported metric data, it would use the startup time of the parent process as the start time for that metric data instead of its own start time. This has been fixed.

Fix for Mongo ensure_index instrumentation (3.7.1.182)

The Mongo instrumentation for ensure_index in 3.7.1.180 was not properly calling through to the uninstrumented version of this method. This has been fixed in 3.7.1.182. Thanks to Yuki Miyauchi for the fix!