Java agent - Release notes

Version 5.5

10 August 2022

Enhancements:

Support for Micronaut framework.
Support for Cassandra Datastax 4.x.
Support for tracking HTTP calls (blocking calls) in Spring WebClient.
Support for whitespaces in JMX query names.
Distributed Tracing support for HttpURLConnection.
Collection of Spring Core and Spring Cloud Function jar versions for Spring4Shell vulnerability reporting.

Issue Fix:

The issue with MSSQL queries being displayed under generic JDBC component names has been fixed.

Version 5.4.1

06-01-2022

Enhancements:

Vulnerable classes of the log4j library have been removed (Agent uses log4j v1.2.17). We will be using the latest version of log4j in the next release.

Version 5.4.0

05-01-2022

Enhancements:

Play 2.7 & 2.8 framework supported.
OkHttp3 Client up to v4.8 supported.
REDIS component has been enhanced to monitor additional operations like hset, hget, and so on.

Issue Fixes:

Agent shutdown time in apminsight.info kept appending to previous values, this has now been resolved. Only the latest values are retained now.
An Option to enable/disable diagnostics logs has been introduced.
Null value issue in JMX metrics caused by a NaN exception has been fixed.
Timeout of HttpUrlConnection class being captured separately- this issue has been fixed.

Version 5.3

03-09-2021

Enhancements:

Monitoring support for messaging queues like Kafka, RabbitMQ and ActiveMQ
Headers of web requests are captured from this agent version.
Support for tracking key transactions with alerts.
Agent can be installed in runtime, without a restart.

Issue fix:

When log level set to OFF, agent was still printing few lines before being disabled. This has been fixed .

Version 5.2

22-06-2021

Enhancements:

Monitoring support for Java 15
Standalone HTTP calls are tracked as background transactions - this was deprecated in agent version 5.1 and is now reverted back.
Automatic transaction grouping is applied to background transactions

Issue fix:

SQL queries were not captured while using MySQL client v8.x - this has been fixed.

Version 5.1.2

02-06-2021

Security fix:

Read/Write permission for APM agent configuration file is set only for the current user running the app server.

Version 5.1.1

21-04-2021

Issue fix:

Error in agent communication - APM Agent has been throwing “CertificateChain error" & "PKIX path building failed” and this was causing trouble in sending requests to the server. This issue has been fixed by making HTTPS as the default protocol.

Version 5.1

24-03-2021

Enhancements:

Checksum verification to validate the integrity of the downloaded agent
Support for OkHttp client
Http calls in the background are no longer tracked as separate background transactions. It will be captured as a part of any other transaction where it is executed.

Version 5.0

15-12-2020

New Feature:

Support for JMX metrics - JMX metrics are captured and can be viewed under App parameters. These metrics are captured by default for renowned app servers. Learn more.

Version 4.9

05-08-2020

Enhancements:

Enhanced agent diagnostic collector for troubleshooting - a new log file is introduced for diagnostics tasks.
Monitoring Support fot Elasticsearch Rest Low Level client.
Count of blocked threads is displayed by default in App parameters.
Request method and status code of HTTP calls are now displayed in Traces.

Issue Fixes:

Issues in monitoring Oracle DB queries - this has been resolved.
Stackoverflow error while extracting host details of Informix DB - this has been fixed.
Issues in tracing response header in distributed tracing - this has been fixed.

Version 4.8.1

01-04-2020

Enhancements:

Monitoring support for Nexus repository manager and SonarQube
Monitoring support for MySQL 8
Support for tracking Http Status code in UnderTow server

Issue Fixes

Typo mistake in updating instrumentation.conf file in runtime - this has been fixed
Deadlock between tomcat main thread logger init and agent httpclient init - this has been fixed
Unable to identify the index & type for Elasticsearch Transport client, has been fixed
Agent was unable to fetch db queries when Weblogic jdbc wrapper is enabled, has been fixed

Version 4.8.0

27-02-2020

Enhancements:

Custom instrumentation can be configured from the server side.
Instance level custom instrumentation can be done by creating instrumenation.conf file. (custom_instrumenation.conf file is deprecated from this version)

Version 4.7.0

19-12-2019

Enhancements:

Support for customizing transaction names via API
Support for adding custom parameters in a transaction via API
Support for distributed tracing
Support for JettyHTTP client

Version 4.6.0

30-08-2019

Enhancements:

For dockers, complete container id is taken as host name to support host based licensing.
Agent can now automatically identify AWS ECS environment.
Agent logs can be written in STDOUT, if enabled.
App parameter keynames can also contain DOT (.)

Issue fix:

JVM metrics were displayed with negative values - this issue has been fixed.

Version 4.5.0

20-06-2018

Enhancements:

You can now track calls made to Elasticsearch via Transport client and Rest High Level client.
HTTP request parameters are now captured at the end of transaction.
Agent can now automatically identify GCE and AWS Fargate environments.

Issue fixes:

Null pointer exceptions, that occur while processing Cassandra and MongoDB queries have been fixed.
Retry interval in agent communication has been fixed.

Version 4.4.1

05-03-2019

Issue fixes:

Typo errors while capturing Postgres SQL queries has been fixed.
Host details of the failed Cassandra queries are now captured by the agent.
Agent can now support Jedis latest version 3.0
Null pointer exceptions, that occur while processing SQL queries have been fixed.

New Feature:

31-01-2019

Context-based monitoring: Applications running on the same app server can be monitored as individual contexts. This would help you to view metrics for each context separately.

Issue fixes:

Data mismatch in exception count and CPU time has been fixed.
In case of 100% failure in background transaction, it's minimum response time was not captured properly. This has been fixed.
While capturing logged exceptions, if error message is 'null', agent was throwing NullPointerException - this issue has been fixed.

Version 4.3

31-12-2018

Enhancements:

Monitoring support for applications running in Java 9, 10, and 11.

Issue fixes:

Query strings were captured along with the transaction names in Play framework - this issue has been fixed.
In case of SQL queries, table names were mis matched if SQL queries contained sub queries. This issue has been fixed and table names and operations of primary queries are now captured and displayed.
Unlogged exceptions, captured by the agent are counted under the " Warning" category.

Version 4.2

16-10-2018

Enhancements:

With respect to deprecation of earlier TLS versions, users were requested to upgrade their application programming environments, for uninterrupted monitoring. But with Java agent version 4.2, users need not upgrade their programming environments. The agent is compatible with TLS version 1.2 and ensures un-interrupted monitoring service.

Version 4.1

08-10-2018

Enhancements:

Transaction traces are now captured in case of high exception count, new exception type and high SQL time, apart from default threshold configurations.
In thread profiling, only high CPU consuming threads are profiled instead of dumping all threads.
Table name is shown along with the corresponding SQL operation in Traces.
For background transactions, exception metrics are captured. Also, instance level metrics for background transactions are shown in application dependency maps.

Version 4.0

19-09-2018

Enhancements:

Monitoring support for Filter framework has been re-introduced.

Version 3.9

01-06-2018

New Feature:

App Parameter support: Monitor the size of frequency of an operation or variable using App Parameters.

Enhancements:

Exclude HTTP errors from monitoring to reduce noise in your monitoring environment

Version 3.8

04-05-2018

Enhancements

Proxy passwords have been encrypted and GDPR changes are implememted
All internal components are merged into a single component under the name 'APP CODE'
Number of component metrics per transaction is limited to 15.

Version 3.7

13-03-2018

New Feature

Agent can track external calls even when maximum tracking limit is reached ( Upper limit is set to twice the maximum limit )
Complete query is shown for MongoDB calls
Users can now exclude packages from instrumentation (using key 'exclude.packages' in apminsight.conf file, requires restart)

Enhancements

External HTTP call url length restriction has been removed
Host details added to Memcached & Redis calls in trace details
Trace now shows method call count split-up as first line

Issue fixes

Trace constructions failed when host details are received as empty string (possible while extracting from JDBC urls in DB trackers) - this issue has been fixed and now host details will be skipped, if value is empty

Version 3.6

12-02-2018

New Feature

Users can now use our API to monitor block of code in their application
Users can prepend HTTP method to transaction name, if required

Enhancements

In traces, additional rows are added to highlight un-instrumented block of code between instrumented method calls,
Components HTTP CLIENT & HTTP CONNECTION are merged into a single component named HTTP CALL
In thread profiling, default profiling and sampling intervals have been reduced. Now agent profiles every one hour for 5 minutes

Issue fixes

Agent failed to capture Cassandra query on failure - issue has been addressed and fixed

Version 3.5.1

2-11-2017

Issue Fixes

Passing empty value for Exceptions to ignore, made agent drop all exceptions. It has been fixed.

Version 3.5

1-11-2017

New Feature

Agent can track transactions from JAX-WS framework
Users can now exclude exceptions from tracking
Agent can now track exceptions logged via Log4j2
Users can now use our API for tracking exceptions in their applciation

Enhancements

Error count for database metrics
Host details for Cassandra queries are captured and displayed in traces and Service map
Users can view performance data of Cassandra queriesin Database tab itslef
Agent now supports tracking of SQL calls made via MySQL Client 5.x
Optimized transaction filtering mechanism
Agent can detect whether agent is running in Docker environment
Every exception captured by the agent will be associated to a transaction
Issue of getting empty stacktrace for exceptions has been fixed
Auto-instrumentation will be enabled only in known environment (app server/framework)
HTTP params will be captured in all frameworks & known servers, if enabled
Incase of license expired or exceeded, agent will retry communication for 15 days before shutting itself down

Version 3.4

18-08-2017

New Features

Failed Components' count are captured for each transaction, which can be viewed in Service map
Agent now can track requests to Restlet framework
Agent can now track performance of MongoDB queries
Exceptions handled by Spring framework ExceptionHandler (@ControllerAdvice, @ExceptionHandler) are now captured by the agent. These exceptions can be viewed under Exceptions tab
Users can now provide name for the methods custom instrumented using agent annotation API. Method parameters can also be used for naming the methods

Issue Fixes

HTTP Parameters in Jersey framework were inaccessible by the application, when capture request parameters was enabled. The issue has been addressed and fixed.

Version 3.3.1

04-08-2017

New Feature

Users can now customize agent polling interval (minimum interval is one minute)
Metric thresholds have been modified to be uniform across all APM Insight agents

Issue Fixes

HttpClient used by the agent printing logs in user application logs have been fixed
Incorrect SQL query parsing regex blocked metric processing has been fixed

Version 3.3

16-05-2017

NEW Feature

Support for Java 1.5 has been deprecated. Agent will now work on Java 6 & above
Thread profiling (Scheduled & On-demand)
Agent auto-instruments slow performing methods identified by thread profiling
Agent now filters application packages from native & thrid party packages, which helps in identifying application specific methods for tracking performance.

Enhancements

Data collection will not be disabled when Smart sampler reaches its maximum threshold level

Version 3.1

30-03-2017

New Feature

Users can now exclude transactions from monitoring using regex
Transaction merge patterns can now also applied to background transactions
Agent now can track memory pools of IBM Java in JVM monitoring
Native and application server packages are removed from stacktrace to provide clear view of the code flow
No agent/server restart is required for any changes made in agent configuration files

Version 3.0

11-01-2017

New Feature

Smart Sampling - In(De)crease sampling factor based on CPU & memory usage of JVM
Agent/server restart is not required for changes in custom_instrumentation.conf file to take effect

Enhancements

Agent now tracks SQL calls made via MSSQL sqljdbc.jar

Issue Fixes

Additional checks are introduced to avoid instrumenting abstract methods
Fixed NullPointerException while extracting host address for calls made via Apache HttpClient

Version 2.9.1

04-11-2016

New Feature

External HTTP calls when treated as Background transaction, will use URL for naming the transaction
Agent can identify applications hosted in cloud environment
Agent can now track calls made via Apache HttpClient 4.x
Option to provide license key via environment variable(S247_LICENSE_KEY)

Issue Fixes

Some external HTTP calls were missing their hostname. It has been addressed

Version 2.9

28-09-2016

Enhancements

In case of agent communication failure, agent tries to reconnect at specific intervals

Issue Fixes

Few EJB3 calls, which were not captured has now been addressed - agent can track all kind of EJB3 calls

Version 2.8

18-08-2016

New Feature

Users can now make agent configuration changes from Site24x7 web client
Improved agent response time overhead

Issue Fixes

Stack trace for failed DB queries were not shown previously - This has been fixed and user can see stack trace for the same in the web client

Version 2.7.1

05-08-2016

New Feature:

Agent can track EJB3 calls made in the application

Issue Fixes

Fixed bad requests(HTTP code 400) send by agent to our servers

Version 2.7

22-07-2016

New Feature

Java agent auto-installation and basic troubleshooting options are provided
Agent now tracks transactions in Play 2.5 framework
Agent can monitor applications running on JAVA 8

Issue Fixes

Avoid starting agent services, if duplicate javaagent arguments present

Version 2.6

28-03-2016

New Feature

Agent tracks HTTP response code for all web transactions
Agent can track Cassandra queries made using Datastax client
Traces are now captured based on various paramteres like Response time, external calls, CPU time.
In traces, total method call count is shown in client.
Agent now shows all external calls in Traces
In traces, users can view Success and failed count of external components
Stacktrace are captured and shown for exceptions in trace

Issue Fixes

JVM metrics were collected when monitor is in Suspended state - This has been fixed

Version 2.5

6 -01-2016

New Feature

Agent start-up time has been reduced.
Change log level at runtime without agent/server restart
Agent version can be identified by executing the agent jar (java -jar apminsight-javaagent.jar)
Log location can be identified in System.out along with agent hookup message

Issue Fixes

CPU time calculation for individual transactions has been enhanced
Bundled Log4j trying to initialise user's appenders during auto-initialisation
Throughput per transaction for external components are calculated with precision
Duplicate traces not captured though the option is enabled

Version 2.4

5-11-2015

New Feature

CPU time per transaction is tracked and shown
Agent can now capture traces on violating external component throughput, CPU threshold, pointcut exception
No restart required for changes in background_transactions.conf file
Retransform classes that have loaded before agent initialization

Version 2.3.1

1-10- 2015

New Feature

Agent now tracks AWS calls made from the application using Amazon SDK

Version 2.3

2 -09-2015

New Feature

Exception count and error message are now tracked by the agent
Agent can now track HTTP calls made via java.net package

Version 2.2.1

24 -08- 2015

New Feature

Users can now define and monitor custom components via custom instrumentation
Agent now communicates using TSLv1 protocol

Version 2.2

6 - 08 - 2015

New Feature

Users can now custom instrumen specific methods using agent annotations
Agent is now loaded in bootstrap classloader
Agent can now monitor calls made to Memcached, Redis, Apache HttpClient, and Informix

Issue Fixes

HttpPointcutPropertiesPool removed
Remove threadlocal on dropping RootTracker
Disable JVM collection in Unmanaged state
Stacktrace depth limited to 7

Version 2.1

9 - 06- 2015

Issue Fixes

Issue in duplication of SQL call count due to overloaded methods is now addressed
If agent is used by multiple JVM's , agent logs can be identified using PID's

Version 2.0

05-05-2015

New Feature

Support for Play 2.0 framework
Users can now provide application name in JVM arguements
In virtual host environment, users can view the complete URL of every transaction

Version 1.9

26-12- 2014

New Feature

Agent can upgrade automatically whenever a new agent version is available
Agent can now track transactions from Spring Framework
IBM DB2 SQL calls made via jt400.jar are now monitored
Agent now supports monitoring in Java 7

Issue Fixes

NullPointerException in logger initialization is handled - If log level is undefined, logger will initialize with default values

Version 1.8

15-10- 2014

New Feature

JVM metrics are monitored and shown as a separate tab

Version 1.7

23-05 -2014

New Feature

Background transactions are monitored and shown as a separate tab. Tracking enabled
Agent can track SQL queries from Sybase jdbc4

Version 1.6

16-04- 2014

Enhancements

HTTP parameters can be obfuscated

Version 1.5

30-12-2013

Enhancements

Http request parameters are monitored and can be viewed under traces
Monitor state is maintained locally by the agent in file apminsight.info
Component view for transactions were introduced