PHP agent release notesRSS

End of Life Notices

• Support for PHP 5.3 and PHP 5.4 in the New Relic PHP Agent is deprecated and will be removed in a future version. New Relic highly encourages upgrading to a supported version of PHP - 7.3 or higher as of the date of this release. If you would like to continue running the New Relic PHP agent with PHP 5.3 and 5.4, we recommend using version 9.15 of the agent for maximum compatibility. However please note that we can only offer limited support in this case.
• This release marks the last officially supported New Relic PHP Agent for CentOS 5.
• MacOS builds of the New Relic PHP Agent will no longer be provided, and we will no longer ensure compatibility on MacOS platforms.
• For more information about these EOL notices, see our Explorers Hub post.

New features

• Support has been added for Laminas 3.x.
• Support has been added for Laravel Lumen 6.x, 7.x, and 8.x
• Experimental support has been added for excluding subpaths from Wordpress instrumentation. This lowers the overall Wordpress instrumentation overhead since it reduces the number of files being instrumented, but at the cost of losing visibility into the code in the excluded subpaths. This can be enabled using the ini file setting newrelic.framework.wordpress.hooks_skip_filename.

Bug fixes

• Corrected string representation of arginfo parameter names. Thank you @TysonAndre for this contribution.

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 8.4.0.

New Features

The PHP agent is now open source!

The agent source code is available and open to contributions. You can now report issues and make feature requests for the agent directly on GitHub. See our README for more information.

Bug Fixes

• Under some circumstances, the agent reported a total time higher than the response time when using Zend_Http_Client. This has been fixed.
• The agent leaked a small amount of memory for each fulfilled Guzzle promise. This has been fixed.
• Calls to newrelic_insert_distributed_trace_headers could cause crashes on PHP 7.0, 7.1, and 7.2. This has been fixed.
• In rare cases, using Guzzle with WordPress and PHP 7.4 caused crashes. This has been fixed.

New Features

• Support has been added for Slim Framework 4.x.
• Support has been added for Laravel 7.x.

Bug Fixes

• Users of newrelic_record_datastore_segment may have experienced situations where the total transaction time was higher than the response time. This was fixed and users will see behavior consistent with automatically created datastore segments.
• Previously, WordPress plugins referred to by their path names were not accounted for in caching. This behavior has been fixed, and users to which this applies to should see improvements in overhead.

New Features

• With the addition of attributes on spans, the PHP agent now fully supports Infinite Tracing on New Relic Edge.

  Infinite Tracing observes 100% of your distributed traces and provides visualizations for the most actionable data so you have the examples of errors and long-running traces so you can better diagnose and troubleshoot your systems. You configure your agent to send traces to a trace observer in New Relic Edge. You view your distributed traces through the New Relic’s UI. There is no need to install a collector on your network.

  Infinite Tracing is currently available on a sign-up basis. If you would like to participate, please contact your sales representative.

• Added support for attributes on spans. All custom attributes and some agent attributes previously applied as “Transaction events” are now also applied to the currently executing span, subject to the new span configuration settings.

  • Added the transaction.name to spans.

  • Added http.statusCode to external spans, representing the status code on an http response.

  • Added error attributes to each span that exits with an error or exception. error.class and error.message are now included on the span in which an error or exception was noticed, and, in the case of unhandled exceptions, on any ancestor spans that also exit with an error. Also, the public API method newrelic_notice_error now attaches these error attributes to the currently executing span, while still creating a Transaction Error event.

    Spans with error details are now highlighted red in the distributed tracing UI, and error details will expose the associated error.class and error.message. It is also now possible to see when an exception leaves the boundary of the span, and if it is caught in an ancestor span without reaching the entry span. NOTE: This “bubbling up” of exceptions will impact the error count when compared to prior behavior for the same trace. It is possible now to have a trace that has span errors without showing an error on the root span or entry spans.

  • Added a new API method newrelic_add_custom_span_parameter that allows adding custom attributes to spans. This is independent of the transaction; using this new API to add custom attributes to spans does not add them to transactions. If the maximum number of custom attributes is reached, span-level custom attributes take precedence over transaction-level custom attributes.

  • Added the following span event attributes configuration to enable attribute filtering for spans:

    • newrelic.span_events.attributes.enabled
    • newrelic.span_events.attributes.include
    • newrelic.span_events.attributes.exclude

    Note: Security recommendation—Review your Transaction attributes configuration. Any attribute include or exclude settings specific to Transaction events, should be applied to your Span attributes configuration or your global attributes configuration.

Bug Fixes

• In cases where the agent is configured to connect to the hostname of a daemon that exists in a separate container/host, after successfully connecting, the agent would not attempt to resolve the IP address again. This was seen when the daemon container/host goes down and then comes up again with a new IP address. Now, the agent will wait 45 seconds since either the last known good connection or the last IP address resolution and will attempt to resolve an IP address again.

New Features

• Added support for New Relic Infinite Tracing. Note: the PHP agent does not yet support attributes on spans. This will be available in the next minor release.
• Added the following Infinite Tracing configuration options:
  • newrelic.infinite_tracing.trace_observer.host
  • newrelic.infinite_tracing.trace_observer.port
  • newrelic.infinite_tracing.span_events.queue_size
• Support for auto-instrumenting Symfony 5 applications has been added.
• Support for auto-instrumenting Drupal 9 applications has been added.

Bug Fixes

• In some cases the newrelic-daemon got caught in an infinite loop on startup when the socket it tried to connect to was already acquired by another process. This behavior has been accounted for and fixed.

Bug Fixes

• In some cases, instrumenting Laravel queue applications while having distributed tracing turned on could potentially lead to a segfault. This has been fixed.

Bug Fixes

• In some rare cases where requests to cloud provider metadata endpoints are blocked via certain methods, the PHP Daemon logged panics from the underlying Go HTTP library. This scenario is now accounted for and handled gracefully.

Upgrade notices

• On Linux systems, the default value for newrelic.daemon.address changed from /tmp/.newrelic.sock to @newrelic. This means that by default on Linux, agent and daemon communicate via abstract sockets instead of socket files.
• The PHP Agent installer for Ubuntu/Debian systems now requires Python 3. Debian based distributions with Python 2 are no longer supported.

End of life notices

• The distributing tracing API functions newrelic_create_distributed_trace_payload() newrelic_accept_distributed_trace_payload(), and newrelic_accept_distributed_trace_payload_httpsafe() used to manually instrument applications have been deprecated, and will be removed in a future release.

  Instead, use the API functions compatible with W3C Trace Context support, added in agent version 9.8: newrelic_insert_distributed_trace_headers(), and newrelic_accept_distributed_trace_headers()

Bug fixes

• Under some circumstances, Drupal 8 transactions were named after generic controllers. These names were not useful for troubleshooting.

  Drupal 8 transaction naming is now improved and hooks into Symfony routing to resolve the main controller associated with a route.

New Features

Support for W3C Trace Context, with easy upgrade from New Relic trace context

• Distributed Tracing now supports W3C Trace Context headers for HTTP protocols when distributed tracing is enabled. Our implementation can accept and emit both W3C trace header format and New Relic trace header format. This simplifies agent upgrades, allowing trace context to be propagated between services with older and newer releases of New Relic agents. W3C trace header format will always be accepted and emitted. New Relic trace header format will be accepted, and you can optionally disable emission of the New Relic trace header format.
• When distributed tracing is enabled, there are two new API function calls available that now support W3C tracestate and traceparent distributed tracing headers in addition to the New Relic distributed tracing header information:
  • newrelic_insert_distributed_trace_headers() is used to add distributed tracing headers
  • newrelic_accept_distributed_trace_headers() is used to accept distributed tracing headers
• When distributed tracing is enabled, you can use the new configuration setting newrelic.distributed_tracing_exclude_newrelic_header to exclude the New Relic distributing tracing header and only rely on W3C Trace Context headers.

Bug fixes

• Fixed a case where the memory usage of the PHP agent increases when newrelic.transaction_tracer.max_segments_cli limit is reached.
• In rare cases, optimized segment data structures could cause crashes for long-running transactions that hit the segment limit set via newrelic.transaction_tracer.max_segments_cli or newrelic.transaction_tracer.max_segments_web. This has been fixed.

Known Issues and Workarounds

• If a .NET agent is initiating distributed traces as the root service, you must update that .NET agent to version 8.24 or later before upgrading your downstream PHP New Relic agents to this agent release.