Ruby agent release notesRSS

Developer Mode removed

The Ruby Agent's Developer Mode, which provided a very limited view of your application performance data, has been removed. For more information, check out our community forum.

Support NEW_RELIC_ENV for Rails apps

Previously, users could set the agent environment with NEW_RELIC_ENV only for non-Rails apps. For Rails app, the agent environment would use whatever the Rails environment was set to. Now, NEW_RELIC_ENV can also be used for Rails apps, so that it is possible to have an agent environment that is different from the Rails environment. Thanks Andrea Campolonghi for the contribution, as well as Steve Schwartz for also looking into this issue!

Normalization of external hostnames

Hostnames from URIs used in external HTTP requests are now always downcased to prevent duplicate metrics when only case is different.

Require Ruby 2.0.0+

The agent no longer supports Ruby versions prior to 2.0, JRuby 1.7 and earlier, and all versions of Rubinius. Customers using affected Rubies can continue to run 3.x agent versions, but new features or bugfixes will not be published for 3.x agents. For more information, check out our community forum.

OkJson vendored library removed

Ruby 1.8 did not include the JSON gem by default, so the agent included a vendored version of OkJson that it would fall back on using in cases where the JSON gem was not available. This has been removed.

YAJL workaround removed

yajl-ruby versions prior to 1.2 had the potential to cause a segmentation fault when working large, deeply-nested objects like thread profiles. If you are using yajl-ruby with the JSON monkey patches enabled by requiring yajl/json_gem, you should upgrade to at least version 1.2.

Deprecated APIs removed

• Agent.abort_transaction!
• Agent.add_custom_parameters
• Agent.add_request_parameters
• Agent.browser_timing_footer
• Agent.get_stats
• Agent.get_stats_no_scope
• Agent.record_transaction
• Agent.reset_stats
• Agent.set_user_attributes
• Agent::Instrumentation::Rack
• ActionController#newrelic_notice_error
• ActiveRecordHelper.rollup_metrics_for (may be incompatible with newrelic_moped)
• Instrumentation::MetricFrame.recording_web_transaction?
• Instrumentation::MetricFrame.abort_transaction!
• MethodTracer.get_stats_scoped
• MethodTracer.get_stats_unscoped
• MethodTracer.trace_method_execution
• MethodTracer.trace_method_execution_no_scope
• MethodTracer.trace_method_execution_with_scope
• MetricSpec#sub
• MetricStats#get_stats
• MetricStats#get_stats_no_scope
• NoticedError#exception_class
• Rack::ErrorCollector
• StatsEngine::Samplers.add_sampler
• StatsEngine::Samplers.add_harvest_sampler

The above methods have had deprecation notices on them for some time and have now been removed. Assistance migrating usage of these APIs is available at https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/agents/ruby-agent/troubleshooting/update-... .

The agent no longer deletes deprecated keys passed to add_method_tracer. Passing in deprecated keys can cause an exception. Ensure that you are not passing any of the following keys: :force, :scoped_metric_only, :deduct_call_time_from_parent to add_method_tracer.

The agent no longer deletes deprecated keys passed in as options to NewRelic::Agent.notice_error. If you are passing any of these deprecated keys: :request_params, :request, :referer to the notice_error API, please delete them otherwise they will be collected as custom attributes.

Error handling changes

The agent now only checks for original_exception in environments with Rails versions prior to 5. Checking for Exception#cause has been removed. In addition, the agent now will match class name with message and backtrace when noticing errors that have an original_exception.

Ensure Mongo aggregate queries are properly obfuscated

Instrumentation for the Mongo 2.x driver had a bug where the pipeline attribute of Mongo aggregate queries was not properly obfuscated. Users who have sensitive data in their aggregate queries are strongly encouraged to upgrade to this version of the agent. Users who are unable to upgrade are encouraged to turn off query collection using by setting mongo.capture_queries to false in their newrelic.yml files.

This release fixes New Relic Security Bulletin NR17-03.

Early access Redis 4.0 instrumentation

Our Redis instrumentation has been tested against Redis 4.0.0.rc1.

Ruby 2.4.0 support

The agent is now tested against the official release of ruby 2.4.0, excluding incompatible packages.

Agent-based metrics will not be recorded outside of active transactions

The agent has historically recorded metrics outside of a transaction. In practice, this usually occurs in applications that run background job processors. The agent would record metrics for queries the background job processor is making between transactions. This can lead to display issues on the background overview page and the presence of metrics generated by the background job processor can mask the application generated metrics on the database page. The agent will no longer generate metrics outside of a transaction. Custom metrics recorded using NewRelic::Agent.record_metric will continue to be recorded regardless of whether there is an active transaction.

Include ControllerInstrumentation module with ActiveSupport.on_load

The agent will now use the on_load :action_controller hook to include the ControllerInstrumentation module in to both the Base and API classes of ActionController for Rails 5. This ensures that the proper load order is retained, minimizing side-effects of having the agent in an application.

Ensure values for revisions on Capistrano deploy notices

Previously, running the task to look up the changelog could generate an error, if there weren't previous and current revisions defined. This has now been fixed. Thanks Winfield Peterson for the contribution!

External Segment Rewrites

The agent has made internal changes to how it represents segments for external web requests.

Compatibility with Ruby 2.4.0-preview3

The Ruby agent has been updated to work on Ruby 2.4.0-preview3.

Early Access Sinatra 2.0 instrumentation

Our Sinatra instrumentation has been updated to work with Sinatra 2.0.0.beta2.

Include controller instrumentation module in Rails 5 API

The agent now includes the ControllerInstrumentation module into ActionController::API. This gives Rails API controllers access to helper methods like newrelic_ignore in support of the existing event-subscription-based action instrumentation. Thanks Andreas Thurn for the contribution!

Use Module#prepend for ActiveRecord 5 Instrumentation

Rails 5 deprecated the use of alias_method_chain in favor of using Module#prepend. Mixing Module#prepend and alias_method_chain can lead to a SystemStackError when an alias_method_chain is applied after a module has been prepended. This should ensure better compatibility between our ActiveRecord Instrumentation and other third party gems that modify ActiveRecord using Module#prepend.

Use license key passed in to NewRelic::Agent.manual_start

Previously, the license key passed in when manually starting the agent with NewRelic::Agent.manual_start was not referenced when setting up the connection to report data to New Relic. This is now fixed.

Account for DataMapper database connection errors

Our DataMapper instrumentation traces instances of DataObjects::SQLError being raised and removes the password from the URI attribute. However, when DataObjects cannot connect to the database (ex: could not resolve host), it will raise a DataObjects::ConnectionError. This inherits from DataObjects::SQLError but has nil for its URI attribute, since no connection has been made yet. To avoid the password check here on nil, the agent catches and re-raises any instances of DataObjects::ConnectionError explicitly. Thanks Postmodern for this contribution!

Account for request methods that require arguments

When tracing a transaction, the agent tries to get the request object from a controller if it wasn't explicitly passed in. However, this posed problems in non-controller transactions with their own request methods defined that required arguments, such as in Resque jobs. This is now fixed.

Datastore instance reporting for Redis, MongoDB, and memcached

The agent now collects datastore instance information for Redis, MongoDB, and memcached. This information is displayed in transaction traces and slow query traces. For memcached only, multi requests will expand to individual server nodes, and the operation and key(s) will show in the trace details "Database query" section. Metrics for get_multi nodes will change slightly. Parent nodes for a get_multi will be recorded as generic segments. Their children will be recorded as datastore segments under the name get_multi_request and represent a batch request to a single Memcached instance.

Rescue errors from attempts to fetch slow query explain plans

For slow queries through ActiveRecord 4+, the agent will attempt to fetch an explain plan on SELECT statements. In the event that this causes an error, such as being run on an adapter that doesn't implement exec_query, the agent will now rescue and log those errors. n

Datastore instance reporting for ActiveRecord

The agent now collects database instance information for ActiveRecord operations, when using the MySQL and Postgres adapters. This information (database server and database name) is displayed in transaction traces and slow query traces. For more information, see Ruby instance-level database information.

Add :trace_only option to notice_error API

Previously, calling notice_error would record the trace, increment the error count, and consider the transaction failing for Apdex purposes. This method now accepts a :trace_only boolean option which, if true, will only record the trace and not affect the error count or transaction.

HTTP.rb support

The agent has been updated to add instrumentation support for the HTTP gem, including Cross Application Tracing. Thanks Tiago Sousa for the contribution!

Prevent redundant Delayed::Job instrumentation installation

This change was to handle situations where multiple Delayed::Worker instances are being created but Delayed::Job has already been instrumented. Thanks Tony Brown for the contribution!

Fix for "Unexpected frame in traced method stack" errors

Our ActiveRecord 4.x instrumentation could have generated "Unexpected frame in traced method stack" errors when used outside of an active transaction (for example, in custom background job handlers). This has been fixed.