Ruby agent v8.10.0

v8.10.0

• New gRPC instrumentation

  The agent will now instrument gRPC activity performed by clients and servers that use the grpc RubyGem. Instrumentation is automatic and enabled by default, so gRPC users should not need to modify any existing application code or agent configuration to benefit from the instrumentation. The instrumentation makes use of distributed tracing for a comprehensive overview of all gRPC traffic taking place across multiple monitored applications. This allows you to observe your client and server activity using any service that adheres to the W3C standard.

  The following new configuration parameters have been added for gRPC. All are optional.

  Configuration name	Default	Behavior
  instrumentation.grpc_client	auto	Set to 'disabled' to disable, set to 'chain' if there are module prepending conflicts
  instrumentation.grpc_server	auto	Set to 'disabled' to disable, set to 'chain' if there are module prepending conflicts
  instrumentation.grpc.host_denylist	""	Provide a comma delimited list of host regex patterns (ex: "private.com$,exception.*")

• Code-level metrics functionality is enabled by default

  The code-level metrics functionality for the Ruby agent's CodeStream integration is now enabled by default after we have received positive feedback and no open bugs for the past two releases.

• Performance: Rework timing range overlap calculations for multiple transaction segments

  Many thanks to GitHub community members @bmulholland and @hkdnet. @bmulholland alerted us to rmosolgo/graphql-ruby#3945. That Issue essentially notes that the New Relic Ruby agent incurs a significant perfomance hit when the graphql RubyGem (which ships with New Relic Ruby agent support) is used with DataLoader to generate a high number of transactions. Then @hkdnet diagnosed the root cause in the Ruby agent and put together both a proof of concept fix and a full blown PR to resolve the problem. The agent keeps track multiple segments that are concurrently in play for a given transaction in order to merge the ones whose start and stop times intersect. The logic for doing this find-and-merge operation has been reworked to a) be deferred entirely until the transaction is ready to be recorded, and b) made more performant when it is needed. GraphQL DataLoader users and other users who generate lots of activity for monitoring within a short amount of time will hopefully see some good performance gains from these changes.

• Performance: Make frozen string literals the default for the agent

  The Ruby frozen_string_literal: true magic source code comment has now been applied consistently across all Ruby files belonging to the agent. This can provide a performance boost, given that Ruby can rely on the strings remaining immutable. Previously only about a third of the agent's code was freezing string literals by default. Now that 100% of the code freezes string literals by default, we have internally observed some related performance gains through testing. We are hopeful that these will translate into some real world gains in production capacities.

• Bugfix: Error when setting the yaml configuration with transaction_tracer.transaction_threshold: apdex_f

  Originally, the agent was only checking the transaction_tracer.transaction_threshold from the newrelic.yml correctly if it was on two lines.

  Example:

  # newrelic.yml
  transaction_tracer:
    transaction_threshold: apdex_f

  Copiar

  When this was instead changed to be on one line, the agent was not able to correctly identify the value of apdex_f.

  Example:

  # newrelic.yml
  transaction_tracer.transaction_threshold: apdex_f

  Copiar

  This would cause prevent transactions from finishing due to the error ArgumentError: comparison of Float with String failed. This has now been corrected and the agent is able to process newrelic.yml with a one line transaction_tracer.transaction_threshold: apdex_f correctly now.

  Thank you to @oboxodo for bringing this to our attention.

• Bugfix: Don't modify frozen Logger

  Previously the agent would modify each instance of the Logger class by adding a unique instance variable as part of the instrumentation. This could cause the error FrozenError: can't modify frozen Logger to be thrown if the Logger instance had been frozen. The agent will now check if the object is frozen before attempting to modify the object. Thanks to @mkcosta for bringing this issue to our attention.

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 6.5.0.357.