Version 8.5.0

New features and improvements

• Kafka Connect instrumentation: Adds metrics and transaction tracing for version 2.0.0+ #1324
• Kafka: Added metrics to understand the relationship between consumers, producers, topics and nodes #1223
• IAST: Limiting the supported version range for Apache log4j due to the new version release of Apache log4j on 21 June 2023 #80
• IAST: Support for indication what all API-IDs are scanned or being scanned #80
• All existing instrumnetation now supports Jakarta 10 EE

Fixes

• Implement the getStatus() method in the NRWrapper class for version 5 and 6 of Servlet instrumentation #1315

Deprecations

• aws-wrap-0.7.0
• java.completable-future-jdk8
• play-2.3
• spring-3.0.0
• netty-3.4
• Struts v1

New Contributors

• @deleonenriqueta made their first contribution in #1334
• @javimb made their first contribution in #1223

Full Changelog: v8.4.0...v8.5.0

Version 8.4.0

New features and improvements

Added a public preview of the Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST) mode of the New Relic Security agent. 1224

Warning
The New Relic Security agent IAST mode is in public preview and should only be used in non-production environments.

By default, the New Relic Security agent IAST mode is completely disabled. To enable it, set both newrelic.config.security.agent.enabled=true and newrelic.config.security.enabled=true.

Full configuration options are detailed below (note that the security stanza should be indented two spaces under the pre-existing common stanza in the newrelic.yml config file):

  # New Relic Security vulnerability detection.
  security:
    # Determines whether the security data is sent to New Relic or not. When this is disabled and agent.enabled is
    # true, the security module will run but data will not be sent. Default is false.
    enabled: false

    # New Relic Security provides two modes: IAST and RASP
    # Default is IAST. Due to the invasive nature of IAST scanning, DO NOT enable this mode in either a
    # production environment or an environment where production data is processed.
    mode: IAST

    # New Relic Security’s SaaS connection URL
    validator_service_url: wss://csec.nr-data.net

    # To completely disable all security functionality, set this flag to false. This property is
    # read only once at application start. Default is false.
    agent:
      enabled: false

    # These are the category of security events that can be detected. Set to false to disable detection of
    # individual event types. Default is true for each event type.
    detection:
      rci:
        enabled: true
      rxss:
        enabled: true
      deserialization:
        enabled: true

New Contributors

• @harshit-ap made their first contribution in #1222
• @lovesh-ap made their first contribution in #1274

Full Changelog: v8.3.0...v8.4.0

Version 8.3.0

New features and improvements

• Batch Payloads and Compression for Infinite Tracing: Enhanced performance by providing option to enable payload compression and batching for Infinite Tracing 1146.

• HttpClient v5.0+ Support: The Java agent now supports HttpClient version 5.0 and above 1252.

• On-the-fly Class Retransformation: Classes with Trace annotation are now retransformed upon attach, enhancing instrumentation flexibility 1147.

• Enhanced Logging for Cats Effect 2: Log Cats Effect 2 instrumentation at Finest log level 1173.

• High Security Mode disables user tracking
  1261.

• Selective RollingFileAppender Usage: The RollingFileAppender is now only used when log_limit_in_kbytes is greater than 0, improving logging efficiency 1228.

Fixes

• Fixed Cats Effect 2 Logging: Addressed issues with Cats Effect 2 logging for better reliability 1269.

New Contributors

• @mbszarek made their first contribution in #1173

Full Changelog: v8.2.0...v8.3.0

Version 8.2.0

New features and improvements

• Added support for Java 20 #1226

Fixes

• Prevented a NullPointerException from the lettuce instrumentation #1204
• Fix failure with browser agent auto injection for tomcat versions 8.5.87+ and 9.0.74+ #1225

New Contributors

• @pliu-newrelic made their first contribution in #1206

Full Changelog: v8.1.0...v8.2.0

Version 8.1.0

New features and improvements

• Added support for Webflux 6 1181

• Added support for Spring JMS 6 1088

• Added support for Mongodb Reactive Streams 1164

• Added support for Kafka Streams 1170

  Support for Kafka Streams comes in two flavors, metrics and spans. Metrics are enabled by default, while spans are disabled by default. To enable spans add the following to your newrelic.yml configuration under the common stanza:

common:
  class_transformer:
    kafka-streams-spans:
      enabled: true

• Error fingerprint - supply your own errors inbox group names 1195

  Are your error occurrences grouped poorly? Set your own error fingerprint via a callback function. A new public API method has been added that will accept a user defined proc. The proc will be invoked for each noticed error and whenever it returns a string, that string will be used as the error group name for the error and will take precedence over any server-side grouping that takes place with the New Relic errors inbox. This gives users much greater control over the grouping of their errors. For more information check our API: Error Grouping and APM: Group errors tab pages.

• User tracking - associate errors with a user id 1188

  You can now see the number of users impacted by an error group. Identify the end user with a new public API method that will accept a string representation of a user id and associate that user id with the current transaction. Transactions and errors will then have a new enduser.id agent attribute associated with them. This will allow agent users to tag transactions and errors as belonging to given user ids in support of greater filtering and alerting capabilities. For more information check the Newrelic.setUserId documentation and the Track users impacted with errors inbox page.

• Invoking token.link() outside a transaction will instrument that method to start an async transaction 1140

• The Kafka clients instrumentation has new metrics to list the nodes: MessageBroker/Kafka/Nodes/<node> 1130

Fixes

• Fix ClassCircularityError when agent attaches 1137
• Fix NullPointerException thrown when calling addCustomAttributes 1115
• Make sure TokenAndRefCount.token is never null 1149
• Using a time based cache to store database connection data to prevent a memory leak when instrumenting MySQL client with replication 1114
• Decreased the number of threads used in the HttpUrlConnection instrumentation 1145
• Fix an issue when HttpUrlConnection is used with the legacy cross application tracing 1142
• Performance improvement in Netty’s RequestWrapper 1163
• Gracefully shutdown the agent if it encounters issues on startup 1136
• Fix WeavedMethod and InstrumentedMethod annotations when applied to constructors. 1153
• Performance improvements when using Tomcat 1131
• Fixed a bug that caused the agent to not report some exceptions 1176
• Updated DockerData to increase the number of container IDs detected 1178
• Reduce the number of threads used in Kafka clients instrumentation 1056
• Grammar changes 1175 and 1190

New Contributors

• @fryckbos made their first contribution in #1130
• @yuzawa-san made their first contribution in #1163
• @koenpunt made their first contribution in #1175
• @jbedell-newrelic made their first contribution in #1178

Full Changelog: v8.0.0...v8.1.0

Version 8.0.1

Fixes

• Various fixes to the HttpUrlConnection instrumentation. See the README for full details #1145
• Ensure that TokenAndRefCount.token is never null #1148
• Correct a possible NullPointerException being thrown when calling addCustomAttributes #1141
• Fix ClassCircularityError when agent attaches
  #1139

Full Changelog: v8.0.0...v8.0.1

Version 8.0.0

Important

This release includes a change to the HttpURLConnection instrumentation that creates a TimerTask to help ensure complete externals reporting. Under some circumstances this may result in a large number of threads being created, which may exhaust the maximum allocated to the JVM, causing it to stop. This issue has been fixed in the 8.0.1 release and it is highly recommended that you update to this version of the Java agent.

New features and improvements

• Added support for Slick 3.4.0 on Scala 2.13 #1072
• Added support for Embedded Tomcat JMX #1039
• Updated the Java agent’s snakeyaml dependency to 1.33 #1077
• Added tracer debug logging, which will appear when -Dnewrelic.config.log_level=finest
  and -Dnewrelic.debug=true are set #1066
• Improved logging when using the recordCustomEvent API now includes event type, key and value #1083
• Added Log4j1 instrumentation to support auto log forwarding #1097
• Added JBoss Logging instrumentation to support auto log forwarding #1126
• Real-time profiling for Java using JFR metrics can now be dynamically enabled/disabled via agent configuration #1124

Fixes

• Removed leading slash in JCache metric names #1112
• Fixed a bug that was preventing Log4j2 metrics from getting disabled properly #1068
• Added a missing delimiter in POSTGRES_DIALECT_PATTERN #1050
• Fixed a ClassCastException in GraphQL 16/17 #1082
• Refactored HttpURLConnection instrumentation to fix several bugs that were affecting external calls and distributed traces #1102
• Refactored grpc-1.40.0 instrumentation to ensure that tokens were properly being linked across threads #1105
• Fixed a bug that was causing transactions to fail to link when the Spring Webclient would timeout and emit a ReadTimeoutException #1109

Removals

The following previously deprecated instrumentation modules were removed:

• cassandra-datastax-2.1.2
• httpclient-3.0
• jdbc-embedded-derby-10.2.1.6
• jdbc-embedded-derby-10.10.1.1
• jetty-7
• jetty-7.6
• jetty-9
• jetty-9.0.4
• jetty-9.1
• mongodb-2.12
• mongodb-2.14
• mongodb-3.0
• okhttp-3.0.0
• okhttp-3.4.0
• okhttp-3.5.0

The previously deprecated httpResponseCode, response.status and response.statusMessage transaction/span attributes were removed. These have been replaced by http.statusCode and http.statusText. If you have any custom dashboards or alerts that query the httpResponseCode, response.status, and response.statusMessage attributes then they will need to be updated to instead use http.statusCode and http.statusText.

New Contributors

• @malaki12003 made their first contribution in #1050
• @coreyarnold made their first contribution in #1101
• @smiklos made their first contribution in #1103
• @saxond made their first contribution in #1112

Version 7.11.1

New features and improvements

Fixes

• Fix bug with log4j2 metrics #1068
• Adds a previously missing delimiter in POSTGRES_DIALECT_PATTERN "|" #1050
• Update snakeyaml lib to v1.33 security patch #1077

Deprecation notice

The following instrumentation modules have been deprecated for removal:

• cassandra-datastax-2.1.2
• httpclient-3.0
• jdbc-embedded-derby-10.10.1.1
• jetty-7
• jetty-7.6
• jetty-9
• jetty-9.0.4
• jetty-9.1
• mongodb-2.12
• mongodb-2.14
• mongodb-3.0
• okhttp-3.0.0
• okhttp-3.4.0
• okhttp-3.5.0

The httpResponseCode, response.status and response.statusMessage transaction/span attributes are deprecated and will be removed in a future release. These have been replaced by http.statusCode and http.statusText.

New Contributors

@malaki12003

Full Changelog: v7.11.0...v7.11.1

Version 7.11.0

New features and improvements

• Support Java 19. #1022

• Support Play 2.8.16+. #981

• Support ojdbc8 v21.1.0.0+. #1042

• Support Semeru/OpenJ9 JVMs #993

• Support log forwarding for java.util.logging (JUL). #1049

• Support forwarding context data in logs #866
  The agent can now forward data in Mapped Diagnostic Context (MDC, logback/slf4j) and ThreadContext (log4j2) as attributes when forwarding log records. When the feature is enabled, these attributes will be added with a context. prefix. For details on how to enable this feature see the documentation for context_data

• Custom Event Limit Increase #1036
  This version increases the default limit of custom events from 10,000 events per minute to 30,000 events per minute. In the scenario that custom events were being limited, this change will allow more custom events to be sent to New Relic. There is also a new configurable maximum limit of 100,000 events per minute. To change the limits, see the documentation for max_samples_stored. To learn more about the change and how to determine if custom events are being dropped, see our Explorers Hub post.

• Code-level metrics on by default #1037
  The code-level metrics functionality introduced with agent 7.10 is now enabled by default. This feature will cause an increase in the consumption of data. The amount depends on the application. To disable code-level metrics, see instructions on our code-level metrics documentation.

Fixes

• Prevent an exception from being thrown in the Jedis instrumentation #1011
• Improvement on Http4s transactions #1006
• Fix noticeError API not verifying whether errors were expected #1014
• Adds command for Lettuce queries to clusters #1031
• Fix exception when building up the agent jar from a clean repo #1048
• Better error handling for code-level metrics #1021 #1051
• Fix JDK 11 HttpClient spans not terminating on exception #1053

Deprecation notice

The following instrumentation modules are being deprecated for removal:

• cassandra-datastax-2.1.2
• httpclient-3.0
• jdbc-embedded-derby-10.10.1.1
• jetty-7
• jetty-7.6
• jetty-9
• jetty-9.0.4
• jetty-9.1
• mongodb-2.12
• mongodb-2.14
• mongodb-3.0
• okhttp-3.0.0
• okhttp-3.4.0
• okhttp-3.5.0

The httpResponseCode, response.status and response.statusMessage transaction/span attributes are deprecated and will be removed in a future release. These have been replaced by http.statusCode and http.statusText.

New Contributors

• @rhetoric101 made their first contribution in #991
• @jtduffy made their first contribution in #1038
• @StanlieK made their first contribution in #866

Full Changelog: v7.10.0...v7.11.0

Version 7.10.0

New Features and Improvements

Added the following Jakarta EE 9/9.1 compatible instrumentation:

Jetty 11
Tomcat 10
Enterprise Java Beans 4.0
Jakarta RS/WS
Jersey 3+
Jersey Client 3
JSP 3
Servlet 5 & 6
Jakarata.xml
JMS 3
Glassfish 6.0
Open Liberty 21.0.0.12+

Code-level metrics

For traced methods in automatic instrumentation or from @trace annotations, the agent is now capable of reporting metrics with method-level granularity. When the new functionality is enabled, the agent will associate source-code-related metadata with some metrics. Then, when the corresponding Java class file that defines the methods is loaded up in a New Relic CodeStream-powered IDE, the four golden signals for each method will be presented to the developer directly.

Agent log forwarding now adds the following attributes to log events for the log4j2 and logback1.2 frameworks:

thread.name
thread.id
logger.name
logger.fqcn
error.class
error.stack
error.message

Fixes

Fixed an issue with Distributed Tracing headers not being added on external requests made with the HttpUrlConnection client

Support statement

New Relic recommends that you upgrade the agent regularly to ensure that you're getting the latest features and performance benefits. Additionally, older releases will no longer be supported when they reach end-of-life.

Full Changelog: v7.9.0...v7.10.0