Java agent release notesRSS

Improvements

• Play Framework 2.4 Instrumentation, and Play Framework 2 Improvements

  Previous Java Agent releases supported the Play Framework up to version 2.3. This release includes instrumentation for Play 2.4.x. This release provides more insight than ever before for all versions of Play 2, including improved segment names, and better signal-to-noise ratio in transaction details.

  This instrumentation also takes advantage of the new response time line in the New Relic UI. Because Play is a reactive framework that encourages concurrent activity, your total time for transaction components will often be greater than the response time. If the total time is less than response time, it may indicate resource exhaustion. By separating the total time from the response time, you get a clear picture of when you are getting the benefit of concurrency.

  If you have used the Java Agent to monitor Play before this release, you may see a decrease in response time. The new response time metric more accurately reflects the time from initial request to response.

  We support Play applications written in Java or Scala 2.9.3 - 2.11.x.

  Note: The deprecated -Dnewrelic.bootstrap_classpath system property can result in missing instrumentation and should not be used.

• Netty 3.4 - 4.x Instrumentation

  This release updates our Netty support to include versions from 3.4 to 4.x. Previous release supported up to Netty 3.9. The agent will start transactions for server inbound I/O. The agent will instrument Netty HTTP methods to enable cross application tracing (CAT) in Netty transactions.

• AsyncHttpClient Instrumentation 1.0.2 - 1.9.x

  In this release, you will see the time spent in external service calls made using AsyncHttpClient (also known as Ning Http Client). If the external service is also running New Relic, you will see cross application tracing (CAT) details as well. This includes external calls made from Play WSAPI, which uses AsyncHttpClient.

  Note: As in previous releases, Play 1 applications will not report AsyncHttpClient activity.

• Akka Instrumentation 2.0 - 2.4

  This release enhances our Akka instrumentation by linking an actor message sender to an actor message receiver in the same transaction. In order to avoid over-instrumentation, our Akka instrumentation does not actually start transactions. If you would like a given actor call to mark the beginning of a transaction, you will need to use the @Trace(dispatcher=true) annotation, or some other form of custom instrumentation.

Notes:

This release supports core Akka, not all Akka extensions. In particular, it does not identify transactions that have been routed by Spray, Akka HTTP, or Akka Streams. We have heard from customers that these frameworks are important, and we expect to support them soon! Stay tuned to the Java agent incubator, since we may provide an early access instrumentation module for these frameworks before we release them in the agent.

Known Issues:

• If your application uses AsyncHttpClient's WebSockets, do not use this version. AsyncHttpClient WebSockets requests will fail, or the application will not start.
• In some cases, calls to NewRelic's getBrowserTimingHeader and getBrowserTimingFooter are ignored.

Improvements

• Advanced Analytics for APM Errors

  With this release, the agent reports TransactionError events. These new events power the beta feature Advanced Analytics for APM Errors (apply here to participate). The error events are also available today through New Relic Insights .

  Advanced Analytics for APM Errors lets you see all of your errors, with granular detail. Filter and group by any attribute to analyze them. Take action to resolve issues through collaboration.

Fixes

• Fixed a memory leak in async continuations instrumentation for Jetty 7 and 8.
• Improved error handling with invalid JMX .yml extension files.
• Improved Circuit Breaker logging in the event of a Circuit Breaker trip.
• Fixed a bug in Tomcat 7+ instrumentation where request parameters could occasionally get stripped when using an async servlet with capture_params set to true.

Notes

The Java Agent now collects the following information for web transactions:

• Accept, Host, User-Agent, Content-Length HTTP request headers
• HTTP request method, for example POST or GET
• Content-Type HTTP response header

Known issues

• Fixed in 3.25.0:
  • Setting enable_custom_tracing configuration flag to false can inadvertently disable Netty instrumentation.
  • In some cases JAX-RS annotations on interfaces are not observed, causing transactions using JAX-RS services to be named on the servlet rather than the web servicepath and method.
• Fixed in 3.24.1:
  • The Java agent's Play 2 transaction tracing instrumentation may be incomplete and cause gaps in cross application tracing.
• Fixed in 3.24.0:
  • The Java agent's EJB instrumentation may cause a StackOverflowException to appear in application logs.
  • Applications may continue to experience the additional Circuit Breaker overhead even when disabled.
  • The Java agent may experience increased overhead when using Cross Application Tracing and a large number of threads.
• Fixed in 3.23.0
  • This release may experience a memory leak within the agent for Tomcat containing a large number of static JSPs (5000+).
  • When a transaction makes multiple calls to a database with the same obfuscated SQL, a NullPointerException is may get thrown in the agent.
  • This release contains a bug in New Relic's Cross Application Tracing (CAT) that can cause incorrect service and transaction maps.

The problem happens when non-identical applications, with identical transaction names, would appear to be communicating (in the Transaction / Service maps), when in fact, they were not.

Improvements:

• JCache

  The Java Agent now instruments the JCache API. The instrumentation times cache operations of implementations of the JCache API.

  To get additional information about your operations in the Databases page, enable com.newrelic.instrumentation.jcache-datastore-1.0.0 in your newrelic.yml. This will incur additional overhead.

  class_transformer:
     com.newrelic.instrumentation.jcache-datastore-1.0.0:
       enabled: true

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Fixes:

• Circuit Breaker alerts now better align with data displayed in JVMs tab.
• In some cases the Java Agent's HttpURLConnection instrumentation could report incorrect external response time metrics
• The Java Agent's MongoDB instrumentation no longer reports errors due to runtime exceptions that are caught and handled by applications.
• Fixed an issue where Guice dynamic proxies could be instrumented, potentially causing MGI issues.
• In rare cases a deadlock would occur at startup on some WebSphere applications.
• Fixed an issue that could cause missing Cross Application Tracing information on WebLogic 12 when using HttpURLConnection.

Fixes

• Fixed an issue that could cause NoClassDefFoundErrors when using JDBC ResultSet instrumentation on JBoss.

Fixes

• In some cases JBoss 4.x could fail to start due to a NullPointerException.
• In some cases Dropwizard appservers could fail to start due to a ClassCastException during log initialization.

Improvements

• Redis

  The agent’s Redis instrumentation is now more efficient.

Fixes

• In some cases the HttpClient 3 instrumentation could overstate the external call count.
• In rare cases the agent would report errors that it was configured to ignore.
• Some line numbers did not display correctly in stack traces.

Improvements

• Jetty

  Updated Jetty instrumentation to support Jetty 9.3.

• Thrift

  Added support for Apache Thrift 0.8 and greater. This instrumentation automatically adds timing to Thrift calls and sets transaction names based on Thrift method names. It can be disabled in the newrelic.yml by adding:

  com.newrelic.instrumentation.thrift-0.8:
      enabled: false

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• Resin

  The New Relic Resin Instrumentation now reports errors as HttpErrors, allowing them to be ignored.

• Heap Alerting

  A new heap utilization metric has been created for alerting purposes. This metric tracks the percentage of heap in use as a number between 0 and 1, where 0 means no heap usage and 1 means a full heap. The new metric is: Memory/Heap/Utilization

• Exception messages for allow list

  Java exception messages will now be obfuscated when high-security mode is enabled. If specific exception messages should be allowed through, they can be added to your allow list with the following configuration property:

  strip_exception_messages:
      whitelist: 'java.lang.NullPointerException,java.lang.IllegalStateException'

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  The allow list is a comma-delimited string of exception class package + class name. This can be enabled or disabled independently of high-security mode with the following property:

  strip_exception_messages:
      enabled: true

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Fixes

• Fixed a bug in 3.17.0, that in rare cases could cause an application thread to die. In this case, the agent log has many messages, “ERROR: Inconsistent state!”

Improvements

• Websphere Liberty Profile

  The Java agent now provides instrumentation for WebSphere Liberty Profile. This includes web transaction visibility, Cross Application Tracing, and app server stats.

• Performance improvements

  The Java agent now starts more quickly so applications are available sooner. This release also reduces agent overhead at run time.

• Customize hostname displayed in APM

  A new configuration setting has been added: process_host.display_name. When set in the newrelic.yml configuration file, the display name identifies the host in the APM UI, along with the hostname that the agent automatically captures.

  process_host:
      display_name: hostname

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  In addition, the display name can be set using the NEW_RELIC_PROCESS_HOST_DISPLAY_NAME environment variable. This property can be viewed in all Insights transaction events.

• WebLogic and WebSphere instance name available

  The instance name for WebLogic and WebSphere application servers is now available in transaction traces, traced errors, and Insights transaction events.

• Custom instrumentation of transaction attributes is disabled by default

  Custom attributes defined using the Instrumentation tab in the UI are now disabled by default. In order to enable these attributes, you must have High-security mode disabled and you must place the following text in the common: block of your newrelic.yml:

  reinstrument:
      attributes_enabled: true

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Fixes

• Very large thread profiles were failing to report to RPM, causing the site to display a time out message. The agent will now truncate the size of the profile before sending.

• Cross application tracing date was failing to report when using Jersey 2 endpoints.

• Spring AOP instrumentation is now disabled by default. It was exercising a bug in certain versions of Java 8 that caused the JVM to crash. To re-enable, include the following in your newrelic.yml:

  com.newrelic.instrumentation.spring-aop-2:
         enabled: true

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• RabbitMQ metrics could double-report for some versions of RabbitMQ. This was introduced in Java agent version 3.16.1 and is fixed in this version.

• In rare cases the agent would report a LinkageError.