Elastic APM Java Agent release notes

Review the changes, fixes, and more in each version of Elastic APM Java Agent.

To check for security updates, go to Security announcements for the Elastic stack.

Release date: November 18, 2024

• Fix JMX metric warning message about unsupported composite value types - #3849
• Fix JAX-WS transaction naming for @WebMethod annotated methods - #3850

Release date: September 23, 2024

• Added experimental option to capture HTTP client request bodies for Apache Http Client v4 and v5, HttpUrlConnection and Spring WebClient - #3776, #3962, #3724, #3754, #3767
• Agent health metrics now GA - #3802

• Fix log4j2 log correlation with shaded application jar - #3764
• Improve automatic span class name detection for Scala and nested/anonymous classes - #3746

Release date: July 24, 2024

• Added option to make routing-key part of RabbitMQ transaction/span names - #3636
• Added internal option for capturing request bodies for apache httpclient v4 - #3692
• Added automatic module name to apm-agent-attach - #3743

• Restore compatibility with Java 7 - #3657
• Avoid ClassCastException and issue warning when trying to use otel span links - #3672
• Avoid NullPointerException with runtime attach API and invalid map entries - #3712
• Enhance invalid state JMX metrics handling - #3713
• Skips using NOFOLLOW_LINKS file open option when running on z/OS as it’s unsupported there - #3722

Release date: May 28, 2024

• Added support for correlating APM data with elastic universal profiling data - #3615, #3602, #3607, #3598
• Excluded latest AppDynamics packages from instrumentation (com.cisco.mtagent.*) - #3632

• Fixed edge case where inferred spans could cause cycles in the trace parent-child relationships, subsequently resulting in the UI crashing - #3588
• Fix NPE in dropped spans statistics - #3590
• Fix too small activation stack size for small transaction_max_spans values - #3643

Release date: April 2, 2024

• Differentiate Lambda URLs from API Gateway in AWS Lambda integration - #3417
• Added lambda support for ELB triggers #3411
• Add exclusion list option for calling DatabaseMetaData.getUserName - #3568

• Fixed problems with public API annotation inheritance - #3551

Release date: March 6, 2024

• Avoid another case where we might touch application exceptions for safe_exceptions - #3553
• More robust hostname detection on Windows - #3556

Release date: March 5, 2024

• Bumped base alpine docker image version - #3524
• Replace statement parser cache with an LRU cache to improve efficiency in certain cases #3492

• Added missing support for TracerBuilder in OpenTelemetry bridge - #3535
• Fixed some locations to not touch exceptions when safe_exception is configured - #3543

Release date: February 15, 2024

• Added internal safe_exceptions config option to workaround JVM bugs related to touching exceptions - #3528

• Cleanup extra servlet request attribute used for Spring exception handler - #3527

Release date: February 13, 2024

• Added a configuration option to use queues in names of spring-rabbit transactions - #3424
• Add option to retry JMX metrics capture in case of exception - #3511

• Add support to CLI attach download for new agent signature for 1.46.0+ - #3513

Release date: January 29, 2024

• Added support for OpenTelementry Attributes db.statement and db.user - #3475

• Fixed NPE in ApacheHttpClientApiAdapter#getHostName - #3479
• Fix span stack trace when combined with span compression - #3474
• Fix UnsupportedClassVersionError java 7 compatibility for jctools - #3483

Release date: December 7, 2023

• Added support for OpenTelemetry annotations - WithSpan and SpanAttribute - #3406
• Only automatically apply redacted exceptions for Corretto JVM 17-20. Outside that, user should use capture_exception_details=false to workaround the JVM race-condition bug if it gets triggered: #3438
• Added support for Spring 6.1 / Spring-Boot 3.2 - #3440
• Add support for Apache HTTP client 5.x - #3419

Release date: November 21, 2023

• Added protection against invalid timestamps provided by manual instrumentation - #3363
• Added support for AWS SDK 2.21 - #3373
• Capture bucket and object key to Lambda transaction as OTel attributes - aws.s3.bucket, aws.s3.key - #3364
• Added context_propagation_only configuration option - #3358
• Added attribute[*] for JMX pattern metrics (all metrics can now be generated with object_name[*:type=*,name=*] attribute[*]) - #3376

• Fixed too many spans being created for HTTPUrlConnection requests with method HEAD - #3353
• Enhance k8s container/pod and host name detection heuristics - #3418

Release date: September 26, 2023

• Add support for Elasticsearch client 8.9 - #3283
• Added baggage_to_attach config option to allow automatic lifting of baggage into transaction, span and error attributes - #3288, #3289
• Exclude elasticsearch 8.10 and newer clients from instrumentation because they natively support OpenTelemetry - #3303
• Switched to OpenTelemetry compatible context propagation for Kafka - #3300
• Changed cloud.project.id collected in Google Cloud (GCP) to be the project-id - #3311
• Allow running the IntelliJ debug agent in parallel - #3315
• Capture span.sync = false for ES restclient async spans plugins

• Prevent bad serialization in edge cases for span compression - #3293
• Allow overriding of transaction type for Servlet-API transactions - #3226
• Fix micrometer histogram serialization - #3290, #3304
• Fix transactions not being correctly handled in certain edge cases - #3294
• Fixed JDBC instrumentation for DB2 - #3313
• Fixed OpenTelemetry metrics export breaking when instrument=false is configured - #3326

Release date: August 11, 2023

• Virtual thread support - #3244, #3286
• Include application_packages in JMS listener naming heuristic - #3299

• Fix JVM memory usage capture - #3279

Release date: August 7, 2023

• Replaced thread-local IO buffers with pooled ones for virtual thread friendliness - #3239

• Fixed Micrometer histograms to be correctly exported with non-cumulative bucket counts - #3264
• Fixed SQS NoClassDefFoundError in AWS SDK instrumentation for async clients - #3266

Release date: July 31, 2023

• Added W3C baggage propagation - #3236, #3248
• Added support for baggage in OpenTelemetry bridge - #3249
• Improved span naming and attribute collection for 7.16+ elasticsearch clients - #3157

• Fixed SQS NoClassDefFoundError in AWS SDK instrumentation - #3254
• Fixed reference counting issues in elasticsearch instrumentation - #3256

Release date: July 19, 2023

• Capture container.id for cgroups v2 - #3199

• fix jakarta.jms support (wasn’t fully implemented) - #3198
• Fixed agent programmatic attach with immutable config - #3170
• Prevent overriding ELASTIC_APM_AWS_LAMBDA_HANDLER in AWS lambda execution when explicitly set - #3205
• Ignore gc allocation metrics when unsupported - #3225
• Avoid warning log message when grpc transactions are cancelled before end - #3223
• Align agent hostname capture to FQDN - #3188

Release date: June 13, 2023

• Capture S3 operation details as OTel attributes - #3136
• Added support for recording AWS lambda transactions even if the JVM crashes or runs into a timeout - #3134
• Add extra built-in metrics: jvm.fd.* and jvm.memory.pool.non_heap.* - #3147
• Capture span.sync = false for some async spans plugins - #3164

• Fixed classloading for OpenTelemetry dependencies in external plugins - #3154
• Handled an edge case where exceptions thrown by instrumentation code could escape into the application - #3159
• Added guard to gracefully handle the presence of pre 3.0 Servlet API versions in the spring service name discovery mechanism - #3172

Release date: May 4, 2023

• Added tests for Quarkus / RestEasy, adjusted vert.x router transaction name priority - #1765
• Added support for Spring WebMVC 6.x and Spring Boot 3.x - #3094
• Added service.environment to logs for service correlation - #3115
• Optimize agent overhead when an excessive number of spans is created with trace_methods, @Traced or @CaptureSpan - #3151

• Do not use proxy to retrieve cloud metadata - #3108

Release date: April 11, 2023

• Add the disable_outgoing_tracecontext_headers ([1.37.0]) config option to disable injection of tracecontext on outgoing communication - #2996
• Add the [profiling_inferred_spans_logging_enabled ([1.37.0])]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/config-profiling.md#config-profiling-inferred-spans-logging-enabled) config option to suppress async profiler warning messages - #3002
• Added support for OpenTelemetry metrics - #2968, #3014
• Added agent.activation_method telemetry - #2926
• Allow creation of exit spans with @CaptureSpan and @Traced annotations - #3046
• Add the long_field_max_length (performance [1.37.0]) config to enable capturing larger values for specific fields - #3027
• Provide fallback correlation when ecs-logging-java is used - #3064
• Added separate Java 8 build with updated log4j2 - #3076
• Add [elasticsearch_capture_body_urls]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/config-datastore.md#config-elasticsearch-capture-body-urls) option to customize which Elasticsearch request bodies are captured - #3091

• Fixed used instrumentations printed on shutdown #3001
• Prevent potential connection leak on network failure - #2869
• Fix for inferred spans where the parent id was also a child id - #2686
• Fix context propagation for async 7.x and 8.x Elasticsearch clients - #3015
• Fix exceptions filtering based on ignore_exceptions ([1.11.0]) when those are nested - #3025
• Fix usage of HttpUrlConnection.getResponseCode() causing an error event due to exception capturing, even when it is internally handled - #3024
• Fix source code jar to contain apm-agent sources - #3063
• Fix security exception when security manager is used with log_level=debug - #3077
• Fix slim attacher when downloading agent version - #3096

Release date: January 27, 2023

• Add experimental log sending from the agent with log_sending - #2694
• Add bootstrap checks that enable [JVM Filtering]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/set-up-apm-java-agent.md#jvm-filtering) on startup - #2951
• Added support for LDAP - #2977

• Use 127.0.0.1 as default for server_url to prevent ipv6 ambiguity - #2927
• Fix some span-compression concurrency issues - #2865
• Add warning when agent is accidentally started on a JVM/JDK command-line tool - #2924
• Fix NullPointerException caused by the Elasticsearch REST client instrumentation when collecting dropped span metrics - #2959
• Fix SQS Instrumentation for Non-MessageReceive actions to avoid NoSuchElementException - #2979
• Fix java.lang.NoSuchMethodError when using the agent with WebFlux and Spring 6.x/Spring Boot 3.x - #2935
• Optimize JMS listener matcher - #2930
• Handle Corretto causing a sigsegv when accessing Throwables inside some instrumentation with AWS - #2958
• Change Micrometer logs to DEBUG from INFO - #2914

Release date: December 6, 2022

• Add support for log correlation for java.util.logging (JUL) - #2724
• Add support for spring-kafka batch listeners - #2815
• Improved instrumentation for legacy Apache HttpClient (when not using an HttpUriRequest, such as BasicHttpRequest)
• Prevented exclusion of agent-packages via classes_excluded_from_instrumentation to avoid unintended side effects
• Add Tomcat support for log reformatting - #2839
• Capture Elastic cluster name on Elastic Cloud - #2796
• Attacher CLI: added a --no-fork config to opt out from executing a forked process as different user.If --no-fork is used alongside discovery rules that contain only --include-pid rules, the attacher will not execute JVM discovery - #2863
• Add the option to instrument very old bytecode through the instrument_ancient_bytecode config option - #2866
• Capture MongoDB statements - #2806
• Added agent health and background overhead metrics (experimental) - #2864, #2888
• Added support for Finagle Http Client - #2795
• Add support for Apache HTTP client 3.x - #2853
• Made api_key and secret_token configuration options dynamic - #2889
• Misaligned micrometer interval vs Elastic agent metrics reporting interval now handled - #2801
• Histograms now reported from micrometer metrics - #2895

• Remove context.db fields from S3 instrumentation - #2821
• Allowed OpenTelemetry Span.updateName to update names provided by elastic - #2838
• Prevent random NullPointerException when span compression is not possible - #2859
• Fix security manager issues on OpenJDK 17, with errors like: java.lang.UnsupportedOperationException: Could not access Unsafe class - #2874
• Fix security manager compatibility with Tomcat - #2871 and #2883
• Fix NPE with Spring MVC - #2896

Release date: September 29, 2022

• Redact *principal* headers by default - #2798
• Activation stack was extracted from ElasticApmTracer into a separate class, where it also enforces a stack depth to eliminate activation leaks - #2783

• Fix imports (leading to NoClassDefFoundError) in the AWS SDK instrumentation - #2800

Release date: September 14, 2022

• Changed the main agent class loader to work in a child-first delegation model, thus making it more isolated by preferring self packaged version of classes that are available also in the parent (bootstrap) class loader - #2728
• Capture Oracle SID in connection string - #2709
• Implemented span links in the OTel bridge - #2685
• Added support for MongoDB 4.x Sync Driver - #2241
• Capture keyspace in db.instance for Cassandra database - #2684
• Added support for AWS SQS - #2637
• Add trace_continuation_strategy configuration option - #2760
• Capture user from Azure SSO with Servlet-based app containers - #2767
• Promote WebFlux & Reactor to GA and enable it by default - #2782

• Fix unexpected side effects of toString calls within reactor instrumentation - #2708
• Fix Vert.x instrumentation for 4.3.2 - #2700
• Fix NullPointerException in AmazonHttpClientInstrumentation - #2740
• Fix stack frame exclusion patterns - #2758
• Fix NullPointerException with compressed spans - #2755
• Fix empty Servlet path with proper fallback - #2748
• Fix ClosedByInterruptException during indy bootstrap method resolution - #2752
• Enhance exclusion of other APM agents - #2766
• Avoid warning when log correlation option is provided in remote config - #2765
• Update async-profiler to 1.8.8 to avoid missing symbol log spam - #2775
• Fix container ID discovery for containers managed through AWS Fargate - #2772
• Make traceparent header computation thread-safe - #2747
• Fix OTel bridge with multiple OTel APIs or external plugins - #2735

Release date: July 8, 2022

• Add support for Spring WebClient - #2229
• Added undocumented and unsupported configuration metric_set_limit to increase the metric set limit - #2148
• Added transaction_name_groups configuration option - #2676

• Fix for JAX-WS (SOAP) transaction names. The agent now properly names transaction for web service methods that are not annotated with @WebMethod. - #2667
• Fix public API backward compatibility that was broken in 1.32.0. With this version you can use any version of the public API once again - #2682
• Fix flaky transaction name with Webflux+Servlet - #2695

Release date: June 13, 2022

• Promote mature agent features as Generaly Available (GA) - #2632
  • [OpenTelemetry bridge]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/opentelemetry-bridge.md) is now enabled by default
  • [Circuit breaker]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/config-circuit-breaker.md) marked as GA (still disabled by default)
  • [API Attach]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/setup-attach-api.md) and [CLI Attach]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/setup-attach-cli.md) marked as GA
  • [use_path_as_transaction_name]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/config-http.md#config-use-path-as-transaction-name) configuration option marked as GA
  • Dubbo instrumentation is now enabled by default
  • com.sun.net.httpserver.HttpServer instrumentation marked as GA
• Struts action invocations via an action chain result start a new span - #2513
• Added official support for Elasticsearch Java API client - #2211
• Added the ability to make spans non-discardable through the public API and the OpenTelemetry bridge - #2632
• Added support for the new service target fields - #2578
• Capture the database name from JDBC connection string - #2642
• Added an additional span around Javalin template renderers - #2381
• Added support for downloading the latest agent version through the attach CLI by setting --download-agent-version latest. In addition, when using the apm-agent-attach-cli-slim.jar, which does not contain a bundled agent, the latest version will be downloaded from maven at runtime unless configured otherwise through --download-agent-version - #2659
• Added span-links to messaging systems instrumentation (supported by APM Server 8.3+ only) - #2610

• Fix missing attributes in bridged OTel transactions - #2657
• Fix transaction.result with bridged OTel transactions - #2660

Release date: May 17, 2022

• Vert.x 3.x instrumentation was refactored to remove constructor instrumentation as well as wrapping of response handler. In addition, in HTTP 2 request handling, transactions are ended when the request end event occurs and are kept alive until response end, when they are allowed to recycle. This allows for spans representing asynchronous handling of requests for which the corresponding transaction has ended - #2564
• Jedis clients instrumentation was changed
• Set the service version when using the ECS reformatting of the application logs: #2603
• Add ECS-reformatting support for java.util.logging - #2591
• Added support for setting the service version on Log4j2’s EcsLayout - #2604
• Added support for AWS S3 and DynamoDB - #2606
• Added support for Jedis 4.x clients - #2626

• Fixed multiple dropped stats types in a transaction producing invalid JSON: #2589
• Fixed NoClassDefFoundError when using OTel bridge and span.*current() : #2596
• Fallback to standard output when Security Manager prevents writing to log file - #2581
• Fix missing transactions when using Vert.x 3.x with HTTP 1 - #2564
• Fix Vert.x GET null transactions to be named GET unknown route, according to spec - #2564
• Fix OpenTelemetry bridge span end with explicit timestamp - #2615
• Fix improper naming for scheduled transactions created by java.util.TimerTask instrumentation - #2620
• Properly handle java.lang.IllegalStateException related to premature invocation of ServletConfig#getServletContext() in Servlet#init() instrumentations - #2627

Release date: April 12, 2022

• Fixed AWS Lambda instrumentation for AWS handler classes with input object types that are not AWS Events classes - #2551
• Fixed service name discovery based on MANIFEST.MF file through ServletContainerInitializer#onStartup on Jakarta Servlet containers - #2546
• Fix shaded classloader package definition - #2566
• Fix logging initialization with Security Manager - #2568
• normalize empty transaction.type and span.type - #2525
• Allowing square brackets within the [capture_jmx_metrics ([1.11.0])]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/config-jmx.md#config-capture-jmx-metrics) config value - #2547
• Fixed duplicated ending of HttpUrlConnection spans - #2530
• Compressed span fixes - #2576, #2552, #2558

Release date: March 22, 2022

• Logging frameworks instrumentations - #2428. This refactoring includes:
• Log correlation now works based on bytecode instrumentation rather than ActivationListener that directly updates the MDC
• Merging the different instrumentations (log-correlation, error-capturing and ECS-reformatting) into a single plugin
• Module structure and package naming changes
• Added support for setting service name and version for a transaction via the public api - #2451
• Added support for en-/disabling each public annotation on each own - #2472
• Added support for compressing spans - #2477
• Added microsecond durations with us as unit - #2496
• Added support for dropping fast exit spans - #2491
• Added support for collecting statistics about dropped exit spans - #2505
• Making AWS Lambda instrumentation GA - includes some changes in Lambda transaction metadata fields and a dedicated flush HTTP request to the AWS Lambda extension - #2424
• Changed logging correlation to be on by default. This change includes the removal of the now redundant enable_log_correlation config option. If there’s a need to disable the log correlation mechanism, this can be done now through the disable_instrumentations config - #2428
• Added automatic error event capturing for log4j1 and JBoss LogManager - #2428
• Issue a warning when security manager is mis-configured - #2510
• Add experimental OpenTelemetry API bridge - #1631
• Proxy classes are excluded from instrumentation in more cases - #2474
• Only time type/method matching if the debug logging is enabled as the results are only used when debug logging is enabled - #2471

• Fix cross-plugin dependencies triggering NoClassDefFound - #2509
• Fix status code setting in AWS Lambda transactions triggered by API Gateway V1 - #2346
• Fix classloading OSGi bundles with partial dependency on Servlet API + avoid SecurityException with Apache Sling - 2418
• Respect transaction_ignore_urls and transaction_ignore_user_agents when creating transactions in the spring webflux instrumentation - #2515

Release date: February 9, 2022

• Exceptions that are logged using the fatal log level are now captured (log4j2 only) - #2377
• Replaced authorization in the default value of sanitize_field_names with *auth* - #2326
• Unsampled transactions are dropped and not sent to the APM-Server if the APM-Server version is 8.0+ - #2329
• Adding agent logging capabilities to our SDK, making it available for external plugins - #2390
• Service name auto-discovery improvements
• For applications deployed to application servers (war files) and standalone jars that are started with java -jar, the agent now discovers the META-INF/MANIFEST.MF file.
• If the manifest contains the Implementation-Title attribute, it is used as the default service name - #1921, #2434
  Note: this may change your service names if you relied on the auto-discovery that uses the name of the jar file. If that jar file also contains an Implementation-Title attribute in the MANIFEST.MF file, the latter will take precedence.
• When the manifest contains the Implementation-Version attribute, it is used as the default service version - #1726, #1922, #2434
• Added support for instrumenting Struts 2 static resource requests - #1949
• Added support for Java/Jakarta WebSocket ServerEndpoint - #2281
• Added support for setting the service name on Log4j2’s EcsLayout - #2296
• Print the used instrumentation groups when the application stops - #2448
• Add elastic.apm.start_async property that makes the agent start on a non-premain/main thread - #2454

• Fix runtime attach with some docker images - #2385
• Restore dynamic capability to log_level config for plugin loggers - #2384
• Fix slf4j-related LinkageError - #2390 and #2376
• Fix possible deadlock occurring when Byte Buddy reads System properties by warming up bytecode instrumentation code paths. The BCI warmup is on by default and may be disabled through the internal warmup_byte_buddy config option - #2368
• Fixed few dubbo plugin issues - #2149
• Dubbo transaction will should be created at the provider side
• APM headers conversion issue within dubbo transaction
• Fix External plugins automatic setting of span outcome - #2376
• Avoid early initialization of JMX on Weblogic - #2420
• Automatically disable class sharing on AWS lambda layer - #2438
• Avoid standalone spring applications to have two different service names, one based on the jar name, the other based on spring.application.name.

Release date: December 30, 2021

• Update Log4j to 2.12.4 and log4j2-ecs-layout to 1.3.2 - #2378

• Fix @Traced annotation to return proper outcome instead of failed - #2370

Release date: December 22, 2021

• Update Log4j to 2.12.3
• Update ecs-logging-java to 1.3.0

• Gracefully handle JDBC drivers which don’t support Connection#getCatalog - #2340
• Fix using JVM keystore options for communication with APM Server - #2362

Release date: December 16, 2021

• Update Log4j to 2.12.2

• Fix module loading errors on J9 JVM - #2341
• Fixing log4j configuration error - #2343

Release date: December 10, 2021

• Added support to selectively enable instrumentations - #2292

• Fix for "Log4Shell" RCE 0-day exploit in log4j CVE-2021-44228 - #2332
• Preferring controller names for Spring MVC transactions, use_path_as_transaction_name only as a fallback - #2320

Release date: December 7, 2021

• Adding experimental support for [AWS Lambda]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/aws-lambda.md) - #1951
• Now supporting tomcat 10 - #2229

• Fix error with parsing APM Server version for 7.16+ - #2313

Release date: November 30, 2021

• Add support to Jakarta EE for JSF - #2254

• Resolves Local Privilege Escalation issue ESA-2021-30 CVE-2021-37942
• Fixing missing Micrometer metrics in Spring boot due to premature initialization - #2255
• Fixing hostname trimming of FQDN too aggressive - #2286
• Fixing agent unknown version - #2289
• Improve runtime attach configuration reliability - #2283

Release date: November 15, 2021

• Improved capturing of logged exceptions when using Log4j2 - #2139
• Update to async-profiler 1.8.7 and set configured safemode at load time though a new system property - #2165
• Added support to capture context.message.routing-key in rabbitmq, spring amqp instrumentations - #1767
• Breakdown metrics are now tracked per service (when using APM Server 8.0) - #2208
• Add support for Spring AMQP batch API - #1716
• Add the (current) transaction name to the error (when using APM Server 8.0) - #2235
• The JVM/JMX metrics are reported for each service name individually (when using APM Server 8.0) - #2233
• Added [span_stack_trace_min_duration]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/config-stacktrace.md#config-span-stack-trace-min-duration) option. This replaces the now deprecated span_frames_min_duration option. The difference is that the new option has more intuitive semantics for negative values (never collect stack trace) and zero (always collect stack trace). - #2220
• Add support to Jakarta EE for JAX-WS - #2247
• Add support to Jakarta EE for JAX-RS - #2248
• Add support for Jakarta EE EJB annotations @Schedule, @Schedules - #2250
• Add support to Jakarta EE for Servlets - #1912
• Added support to Quartz 1.x - #2219
• Disable compression when sending data to a local APM Server
• Reducing startup contention related to instrumentation through ensureInstrumented - #2150
• Loading the agent from an isolated class loader - #2109
• Refactorings in the apm-agent-plugin-sdk that may imply breaking changes for beta users of the external plugin mechanism
• WeakMapSupplier.createMap() is now WeakConcurrent.buildMap() and contains more builders - #2136
• GlobalThreadLocal has been removed in favor of DetachedThreadLocal. To make it global, use GlobalVariables - #2136
• DynamicTransformer.Accessor.get().ensureInstrumented is now DynamicTransformer.ensureInstrumented - #2164
• The @AssignTo.* annotations have been removed. Use the @Advice.AssignReturned.* annotations that come with the latest version of Byte Buddy. If your plugin uses the old annotations, it will be skipped. #2171
• Switching last instrumentations (trace_methods, sparkjava, JDK HttpServer and Struts 2) to TracerAwareInstrumentation - #2170
• Replace concurrency plugin maps to SpanConcurrentHashMap ones - #2173
• Align User-Agent HTTP header with other APM agents - #2177

• Resolves Local Privilege Escalation issue ESA-2021-29 CVE-2021-37941
• Fix k8s metadata discovery for containerd-cri envs - #2126
• Fixing/reducing startup delays related to ensureInstrumented - #2150
• Fix runtime attach when bytebuddy is in application classpath - #2116
• Fix failed integration between agent traces and host metrics coming from Beats/Elastic-Agent due to incorrect hostname discovery - #2205
• Fix infinitely kept-alive transactions in Hikari connection pool - #2210
• Fix few Webflux exceptions and missing reactor module - #2207

Release date: December 30, 2021

• Update Log4j to 2.12.4 and log4j2-ecs-layout to 1.3.2 - #2378

Release date: December 22, 2021

• Update Log4j to 2.12.3
• Update ecs-logging-java to 1.3.0

Release date: September 14, 2021

• Improved naming for Spring controllers - #1906
• ECS log reformatting improvements - #1910
• Automatically sets service.node.name in all log events if set through agent configuration
• Add log_ecs_reformatting_additional_fields option to support arbitrary fields in logs
• Automatically serialize markers as tags where relevant (log4j2 and logback)
• gRPC spans (client and server) can detect errors or cancellation through custom listeners - #2067
• Add -download-agent-version to the agent [attach CLI tool options]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/setup-attach-cli.md#setup-attach-cli-usage-options), allowing the user to configure an arbitrary agent version that will be downloaded from maven and attached - #1959
• Add extra check to detect improper agent setup - #2076
• In redis tests - embedded RedisServer is replaced by testcontainers - #2221
• Reduce GC time overhead caused by WeakReferences - #2086, #2081
• Reduced memory overhead by a smarter type pool caching strategy - #2102.
  The type pool cache improves the startup times by speeding up type matching (determining whether a class that’s about to be loaded should be instrumented). Generally, the more types that are cached, the faster the startup.
  The old strategy did not impose a limit to the cache but cleared it after it hasn’t been accessed in a while. However, load test have discovered that the cache may never be cleared and leave a permanent overhead of 23mb. The actual size of the cache highly depends on the application and loosely correlates with the number of loaded classes.
  The new caching strategy targets to allocate 1% of the committed heap, at least 0.5mb and max 10mb. If a particular entry hasn’t been accessed within 20s, it will be removed from the cache.
  The results based on load testing are very positive:
• Equivalent startup times (within the margins of error of the previous strategy)
• Equivalent allocation rate (within the margins of error of the previous strategy)
• Reduced avg heap utilization from 10%/15mb (previous strategy) to within margins of error without the agent
• Reduced GC time due to the additional headroom that the application can utilize.
• Based on heap dump analysis, after warmup, the cache size is now around 59kb (down from 23mb with the previous strategy).
• Migrate several plugins to indy dispatcher #2087, #2088, #2090, #2094, #2095

• Fix failure to parse some forms of the Implementation-Version property from jar manifest files - #1931
• Ensure single value for context-propagation header - #1937
• Fix gRPC non-terminated (therefore non-reported) client spans - #2067
• Fix Webflux response status code - #1948
• Ensure path filtering is applied when Servlet path is not available - #2099
• Align span subtype for MS SqlServer - #2112
• Fix potential destination host name corruption in OkHttp client spans - #2118

Release date: July 22, 2022

• Support for inheritance of public API annotations - #1805
• JDBC instrumentation sets context.db.instance - #1820
• Add support for Vert.x web client- #1824
• Avoid recycling of spans and transactions that are using through the public API, so to avoid reference-counting-related errors - #1859
• Add enable_experimental_instrumentations ([1.25.0]) configuration option to enable experimental features - #1863
• Previously, when adding an instrumentation group to disable_instrumentations, we had to make sure to not forget the default experimental value, for example when disabling jdbc instrumentation we had to set disable_instrumentations=experimental,jdbc otherwise setting disable_instrumentations=jdbc would disable jdbc and also enable experimental features, which would not be the desired effect.
• Previously, by default disable_instrumentations contained experimental
• Now by default disable_instrumentations is empty and enable_experimental_instrumentations=false
• Set enable_experimental_instrumentations=true to enable experimental instrumentations
• Eliminating concerns related to log4j2 vulnerability - https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2020-9488#vulnCurrentDescriptionTitle. We cannot upgrade to version above 2.12.1 because this is the last version of log4j that is compatible with Java 7. Instead, we exclude the SMTP appender (which is the vulnerable one) from our artifacts. Note that older versions of our agent are not vulnerable as well, as the SMTP appender was never used, this is only to further reduce our users' concerns.
• Adding public APIs for setting destination.service.resource, destination.address and destination.port fields for exit spans - #1788
• Only use emulated runtime attachment as fallback, remove the --without-emulated-attach option - #1865
• Instrument javax.servlet.Filter the same way as javax.servlet.FilterChain - #1858
• Propagate trace context headers in HTTP calls occurring from within traced exit points, for example - when using Elasticsearch’s REST client - #1883
• Added support for naming sparkjava (not Apache Spark) transactions #1894
• Added the ability to manually create exit spans, which will result with the auto creation of service nodes in the service map and downstream service in the dependencies table - #1898
• Basic support for com.sun.net.httpserver.HttpServer - #1854
• Update to async-profiler 1.8.6 #1907
• Added support for setting the framework using the public api (#1908) - #1909

• Fix NPE with null binary header values + properly serialize them - #1842
• Fix ListenerExecutionFailedException when using Spring AMQP’s ReplyTo container - #1872
• Enabling log ECS reformatting when using Logback configured with LayoutWrappingEncoder and a pattern layout - #1879
• Fix NPE with Webflux + context propagation headers - #1871
• Fix ClassCastException with ConnnectionMetaData and multiple classloaders - #1864
• Fix NPE in co.elastic.apm.agent.servlet.helper.ServletTransactionCreationHelper.getClassloader - #1861
• Fix for Jboss JMX unexpected notifications - #1895

Release date: May 31, 2021

• Basic support for Apache Struts 2 #1763
• Extending the [log_ecs_reformatting ([1.22.0] experimental)]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/config-logging.md#config-log-ecs-reformatting) config option to enable the overriding of logs with ECS-reformatted events. With the new OVERRIDE option, non-file logs can be ECS-reformatted automatically as well - #1793
• Instrumentation for Vert.x Web #1697
• Changed log level of vm arguments to debug
• Giving precedence for the W3C tracecontext header over the elastic-apm-traceparent header - #1821
• Add instrumentation for Webflux - #1305
• Add instrumentation for Javalin #1822
• Remove single-package limitation for embedded plugins - #1780

• Fix another error related to instrumentation plugins loading on Windows - #1785
• Load Spring AMQP plugin- #1784
• Avoid IllegalStateException when multiple tracestate headers are used - #1808
• Ensure CLI attach avoids sudo only when required and avoid blocking - #1819
• Avoid sending metric-sets without samples, so to adhere to the intake API - #1826
• Fixing our type-pool cache, so that it can’t cause OOM (softly-referenced), and it gets cleared when not used for a while - #1828

Release date: April 22, 2021

• Overhaul of the [attacher cli]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/setup-attach-cli.md) application that allows to attach the agent to running JVMs - #1667

  • The artifact of the standalone cli application is now called apm-agent-attach-cli. The attacher API is still called apm-agent-attach.

  • There is also a slim version of the cli application that does not bundle the Java agent. It requires the --agent-jar option to be set.

  • Improved logging
    The application uses Java ECS logging to emit JSON logs. The log level can be configured with the --log-level option. By default, the program is logging to the console but using the --log-file option, it can also log to a file.

  • Attach to JVMs running under a different user (unix only)
    The JVM requires the attacher to be running under the same user as the target VM (the attachee). The apm-agent-attach-standalone.jar can now be run with a user that has permissions to switch to the user that runs the target VM. On Windows, the attacher can still only attach to JVMs that are running with under the same user.

  • New include/exclude discovery rules
    

    • --include-all: Attach to all discovered JVMs. If no matchers are provided, it will not attach to any JVMs.
    • --include-user/--exclude-user: Attach to all JVMs of a given operating system user.
    • --include-main/--exclude-main: Attach to all JVMs that whose main class/jar name, or system properties match the provided regex.
    • --include-vmargs/--exclude-vmargs: Attach to all JVMs that whose main class/jar name, or system properties match the provided regex.

  • Removal of options
    

    • The deprecated --arg option has been removed.
    • The -i/--include, -e/exclude options have been removed in favor of the --<include|exclude>-<main|vmargs> options.
    • The -p/--pid options have been removed in favor of the --include-pid option.

  • Changed behavior of the -l/--list option
    The option now only lists JVMs that match the include/exclude discovery rules. Thus, it can be used to do a dry-run of the matchers without actually performing an attachment. It even works in combination with --continuous now. By default, the VM arguments are not printed, but only when the -a/--list-vmargs option is set.

  • Remove dependency on jps
    Even when matching on the main class name or on system properties,

  • Checks the Java version before attaching to avoid attachment on unsupported JVMs.

• Cassandra instrumentation - #1712
• Log correlation supports JBoss Logging - #1737
• Update Byte-buddy to 1.11.0 - #1769
• Support for user.domain #1756
• JAX-RS supports javax.ws.rs.PATCH
• Enabling build and unit tests on Windows - #1671
• Migrate some plugins to indy dispatcher #1369 #1410 #1374

• Fixed log correlation for log4j2 - #1720
• Fix apm-log4j1-plugin and apm-log4j2-plugin dependency on slf4j - #1723
• Avoid systematic MessageNotWriteableException error logging, now only visible in debug - #1715 and #1730
• Fix rounded number format for non-english locales - #1728
• Fix NullPointerException on legacy Apache client instrumentation when host is null - #1746
• Apply consistent proxy class exclusion heuristic - #1738
• Fix micrometer serialization error - #1741
• Optimize & avoid ensureInstrumented deadlock by skipping stack-frame computation for Java7+ bytecode - #1758
• Fix instrumentation plugins loading on Windows - #1671

Release date: March 24, 2021

• Introducing a new mechanism to ease the development of community instrumentation plugins. See plugins_dir (experimental) for more details. This configuration was already added in 1.18.0, but more extensive and continuous integration testing allows us to expose it now. It is still marked as "experimental" though, meaning that future changes in the mechanism may break early contributed plugins. However, we highly encourage our community to try it out and we will do our best to assist with such efforts.
• Deprecating ignore_user_agents in favour of transaction_ignore_user_agents, maintaining the same functionality - #1644
• Update existing Hibernate Search 6 instrumentation to the final relase
• The [use_path_as_transaction_name]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/config-http.md#config-use-path-as-transaction-name) option is now dynamic
• Flushing internal and micrometer metrics before the agent shuts down - #1658
• Support for OkHttp 4.4+ - #1672
• Adding capability to automatically create ECS-JSON-formatted version of the original application log files, through the [log_ecs_reformatting ([1.22.0] experimental)]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/config-logging.md#config-log-ecs-reformatting) config option. This allows effortless ingestion of logs to Elasticsearch without any further configuration. Supports log4j1, log4j2 and Logback. #1261
• Add support to Spring AMQP - #1657
• Adds the ability to automatically configure usage of the OpenTracing bridge in systems using ServiceLoader - #1708
• Update to async-profiler 1.8.5 - includes a fix to a Java 7 crash and enhanced safe mode to better deal with corrupted stack frames.
• Add a warning on startup when -Xverify:none or -noverify flags are set as this can lead to crashes that are very difficult to debug - #1593. In an upcoming version, the agent will not start when these flags are set, unless the system property elastic.apm.disable_bootstrap_checks is set to true.

• fix sample rate rounded to zero when lower than precision - #1655
• fixed a couple of bugs with the external plugin mechanism (not documented until now) - #1660
• Fix runtime attach conflict with multiple users - #1704

Release date: February 9, 2021

• Add cloud provider metadata to reported events, see spec for details. By default, the agent will try to automatically detect the cloud provider on startup, but this can be configured through the cloud_provider config option - #1599
• Add span & transaction outcome field to improve error rate calculations - #1613

• Fixing crashes observed in Java 7 at sporadic timing by applying a few seconds delay on bootstrap - #1594
• Fallback to using "TLS" SSLContext when "SSL" is not available - #1633
• Fixing agent startup failure with NullPointerException thrown by Byte-buddy’s MultipleParentClassLoader - #1647
• Fix cached type resolution triggering ClassCastException - #1649

Release date: January 7, 2021

• Add support for RabbitMQ clients - #1328
• Migrate some plugins to indy dispatcher #1405 #1394

• Fix small memory allocation regression introduced with tracestate header #1508
• Fix NullPointerException from WeakConcurrentMap.put through the Elasticsearch client instrumentation - #1531
• Sending transaction_id and parent_id only for events that contain a valid trace_id as well - #1537
• Fix ClassNotFoundError with old versions of Spring resttemplate #1524
• Fix Micrometer-driven metrics validation errors by the APM Server when sending with illegal values - #1559
• Serialize all stack trace frames when setting stack_trace_limit=-1 instead of none - #1571
• Fix UnsupportedOperationException when calling ServletContext.getClassLoader() - #1576
• Fix improper request body capturing - #1579
• Avoid NullPointerException due to null return values instrumentation advices - #1601
• Update async-profiler to 1.8.3 1602
• Use null-safe data structures to avoid NullPointerException 1597
• Fix memory leak in sampling profiler mechanism - #1592

Release date: November 10, 2020

• The agent version now includes a git hash if it’s a snapshot version. This makes it easier to differ distinct snapshot builds of the same version. Example: 1.18.1-SNAPSHOT.4655910
• Add support for sampling weight with propagation in tracestate W3C header #1384
• Adding two more valid options to the log_level config: WARNING (equivalent to WARN) and CRITICAL (will be treated as ERROR) - 1431
• Add the ability to disable Servlet-related spans for INCLUDE, FORWARD and ERROR dispatches (without affecting basic Servlet capturing) by adding servlet-api-dispatch to disable_instrumentations ([1.0.0]) - 1448
• Add Sampling Profiler support for AArch64 architectures - 1443
• Support proper transaction naming when using Spring’s ServletWrappingController - #1461
• Update async-profiler to 1.8.2 1471
• Update existing Hibernate Search 6 instrumentation to work with the latest CR1 release
• Deprecating the addLabel public API in favor of setLabel (still supporting addLabel) - #1449
• Migrate some plugins to indy dispatcher 1404 1411
• Replace System Rules with System Lambda #1434

• Fix HttpUrlConnection instrumentation issue (affecting distributed tracing as well) when using HTTPS without using java.net.HttpURLConnection#disconnect - 1447
• Fixes class loading issue that can occur when deploying multiple applications to the same application server - #1458
• Fix ability to disable agent on startup wasn’t working for runtime attach 1444
• Avoid UnsupportedOperationException on some spring application startup 1464
• Fix ignored runtime attach config_file 1469
• Fix IllegalAccessError: Module 'java.base' no access to: package 'java.lang'... in J9 VMs of Java version >= 9 - #1468
• Fix JVM version parsing on HP-UX #1477
• Fix Spring-JMS transactions lifecycle management when using multiple concurrent consumers - #1496

Release date: October 6, 2020

• Migrate some plugins to indy dispatcher 1362 1366 1363 1383 1368 1364 1365 1367 1371

• Fix instrumentation error for HttpClient - #1402
• Eliminate unsupported class version error messages related to loading the Java 11 HttpClient plugin in pre-Java-11 JVMs 1397
• Fix rejected metric events by APM Server with response code 400 due to data validation error - sanitizing Micrometer metricset tag keys - 1413
• Fix invalid micrometer metrics with non-numeric values 1419
• Fix NoClassDefFoundError with JDBC instrumentation plugin 1409
• Apply disable_metrics config to Micrometer metrics - 1421
• Remove cgroup inactive_file.bytes metric according to spec 1422

Release date: September 8, 2020

• Enabling instrumentation of classes compiled with Java 1.4. This is reverting the restriction of instrumenting only bytecode of Java 1.5 or higher (#320), which was added due to potential VerifyError. Such errors should be avoided now by the usage of TypeConstantAdjustment - #1317
• Enabling agent to work without attempting any communication with APM server, by allowing setting server_urls with an empty string - #1295
• Add [micrometer support]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/metrics.md#metrics-micrometer) - #1303
• Add profiling_inferred_spans_lib_directory option to override the default temp directory used for exporting the async-profiler library. This is useful for server-hardened environments where /tmp is often configured with noexec, leading to java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError errors - #1350
• Create spans for Servlet dispatches to FORWARD, INCLUDE and ERROR - #1212
• Support JDK 11 HTTPClient - #1307
• Lazily create profiler temporary files #1360
• Convert the followings to Indy Plugins (see details in 1.18.0-rc1 relase notes): gRPC, AsyncHttpClient, Apache HttpClient
• The agent now collects cgroup memory metrics (see details in Metrics page)
• Update async-profiler to 1.8.1 #1382
• Runtime attach install option is promoted to beta status (was experimental).
• Experimental support for runtime attachment now also for OSGi containers, JBoss, and WildFly
• New mitigation of OSGi bootdelegation errors (NoClassDefFoundError). You can remove any org.osgi.framework.bootdelegation related configuration. This release also removes the configuration option boot_delegation_packages.
• Overhaul of the ExecutorService instrumentation that avoids ClassCastException issues - #1206
• Support for ForkJoinPool and ScheduledExecutorService (see [Asynchronous frameworks]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/supported-technologies.md#supported-async-frameworks))
• Support for ExecutorService#invokeAny and ExecutorService#invokeAll
• Added support for java.util.TimerTask - #1235
• Add capturing of request body in Elasticsearch queries: _msearch, _count, _msearch/template, _search/template, _rollup_search - #1222
• Add enabled flag
• Add experimental support for Scala Futures
• The agent now collects heap memory pools metrics - #1228

• Fixes a NoClassDefFoundError in the JMS instrumentation of MessageListener - #1287
• Fix / by zero error message when setting server_urls with an empty string - #1295
• Fix ClassNotFoundException or ClassCastException in some cases where special log4j configurations are used - #1322
• Fix NumberFormatException when using early access Java version - #1325
• Fix service_name config being ignored when set to the same auto-discovered default value - #1324
• Fix service name error when updating a web app on a Servlet container - #1326
• Fix remote attach jps executable not found when java binary is symlinked ot a JRE - #1352
• Fixes error capturing for log4j2 loggers. Version 1.17.0 introduced a regression.
• Fixes NullPointerException related to JAX-RS and Quartz instrumentation - #1249
• Expanding k8s pod ID discovery to some formerly non-supported environments
• When recording is set to false, the agent will not send captured errors anymore.
• Fixes NPE in Dubbo instrumentation that occurs when the application is acting both as a provider and as a consumer - #1260
• Adding a delay by default what attaching the agent to Tomcat using the premain route to work around the JUL deadlock issue - #1262
• Fixes missing jboss.as:* MBeans on JBoss - #1257

Release date: June 17, 2020

• Log files are now rotated after they reach [log_file_size ([1.17.0])]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/config-logging.md#config-log-file-size). There will always be one history file ${log_file}.1.
• Add [log_format_sout ([1.17.0])]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/config-logging.md#config-log-format-sout) and [log_format_file ([1.17.0])]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/config-logging.md#config-log-format-file) with the options PLAIN_TEXT and JSON. The latter uses ecs-logging-java to format the logs.
• Exposing classes_excluded_from_instrumentation config - #1187
• Add support for naming transactions based on Grails controllers. Supports Grails 3+ - #1171
• Add support for the Apache/Alibaba Dubbo RPC framework
• Async Profiler version upgraded to 1.7.1, with a new debugging flag for the stack frame recovery mechanism - #1173

• Fixes IndexOutOfBoundsException that can occur when profiler-inferred spans are enabled. This also makes the profiler more resilient by just removing the call tree related to the exception (which might be in an invalid state) as opposed to stopping the profiler when an exception occurs.
• Fix NumberFormatException when parsing Ingres/Actian JDBC connection strings - #1198
• Prevent agent from overriding JVM configured truststore when not using HTTPS for communication with APM server - #1203
• Fix java.lang.IllegalStateException with jps JVM when using continuous runtime attach - 1205
• Fix agent trying to load log4j2 plugins from application - 1214
• Fix memory leak in gRPC instrumentation plugin - 1196
• Fix HTTPS connection failures when agent is configured to use HTTPS to communicate with APM server 1209

Release date: May 13, 2020

• The log correlation feature now adds error.id to the MDC. See Logging frameworks for details. - #1050
• Deprecating the incubating tag in favour of the experimental tag. This is not a breaking change, so former disable_instrumentation configuration containing the incubating tag will still be respected - #1123
• Add a --without-emulated-attach option for runtime attachment to allow disabling this feature as a workaround.
• Add workaround for JDK bug JDK-8236039 with TLS 1.3 #1149
• Add log level OFF to silence agent logging
• Adds span_min_duration option to exclude fast executing spans. When set together with one of the more specific thresholds - trace_methods_duration_threshold or profiling_inferred_spans_min_duration, the higher threshold will determine which spans will be discarded.
• Automatically instrument quartz jobs from the quartz-jobs artifact #1170
• Perform re-parenting of regular spans to be a child of profiler-inferred spans. Requires APM Server and Kibana 7.8.0. #1117
• Upgrade Async Profiler version to 1.7.0

• When Servlet-related Exceptions are handled through exception handlers that return a 200 status code, agent shouldn’t override with 500 - #1103
• Exclude Quartz 1 from instrumentation to avoid IncompatibleClassChangeError: Found class org.quartz.JobExecutionContext, but interface was expected - #1108
• Fix breakdown metrics span sub-types #1113
• Fix flaky gRPC server instrumentation #1122
• Fix side effect of calling Statement.getUpdateCount more than once #1139
• Stop capturing JDBC affected rows count using Statement.getUpdateCount to prevent unreliable side-effects #1147
• Fix OpenTracing error tag handling (set transaction error result when tag value is true) #1159
• Due to a bug in the build we didn’t include the gRPC plugin in the build so far
• java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: Unable to load class 'jdk.internal...' is thrown when tracing specific versions of Atlassian systems #1168
• Make sure spans are kept active during AsyncHandler methods in the AsyncHttpClient
• CPU and memory metrics are sometimes not reported properly when using IBM J9 #1148
• NullPointerException thrown by the agent on WebLogic #1142

Release date: March 27, 2020

• Gracefully abort agent init when running on a known Java 8 buggy JVM #1075.
• Add support for [Redis Redisson client]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/supported-technologies.md#supported-databases)
• Makes instrument ([1.0.0]), trace_methods ([1.0.0]), and disable_instrumentations ([1.0.0]) dynamic. Note that changing these values at runtime can slow down the application temporarily.
• Do not instrument Servlet API before 3.0 #1077
• Add support for API keys for apm backend authentication #1083
• Add support for [gRPC]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/supported-technologies.md#supported-rpc-frameworks) client & server instrumentation #1019
• Deprecating active configuration option in favor of recording. Setting active still works as it’s now an alias for recording.

• When JAX-RS-annotated method delegates to another JAX-RS-annotated method, transaction name should include method A - #1062
• Fixed bug that prevented an APM Error from being created when calling org.slf4j.Logger#error - #1049
• Wrong address in JDBC spans for Oracle, MySQL and MariaDB when multiple hosts are configured - #1082
• Document and re-order configuration priorities #1087
• Improve heuristic for service_name when not set through config #1097

Release date: March 4, 2020

• Support for the official W3C traceparent and tracestate headers.
  The agent now accepts both the elastic-apm-traceparent and the official traceparent header. By default, it sends both headers on outgoing requests, unless use_elastic_traceparent_header is set to false.
• Creating spans for slow methods with the help of the sampling profiler async-profiler. This is a low-overhead way of seeing which methods make your transactions slow and a replacement for the trace_methods configuration option. See [Java method monitoring]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/supported-technologies.md#supported-java-methods) for more details
• Adding a Circuit Breaker to pause the agent when stress is detected on the system and resume when the stress is relieved. See [Circuit Breaker]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/overhead-performance-tuning.md#circuit-breaker) and #1040 for more info.
• Span#captureException and Transaction#captureException in public API return reported error id - #1015

• java.lang.IllegalStateException: Cannot resolve type description for <com.another.commercial.apm.agent.Class> - #1037
• properly handle java.sql.SQLException for unsupported JDBC features #1035 #1025

Release date: February 11, 2020

• Add support for Redis Lettuce client
• Add context.message.age.ms field for JMS message receiving spans and transactions - #970
• Instrument log4j2 Logger#error(String, Throwable) (#919) Automatically captures exceptions when calling logger.error("message", exception)
• Add instrumentation for external process execution through java.lang.Process and Apache commons-exec - #903
• Add destination fields to exit span contexts - #976
• Removed context.message.topic.name field - #993
• Add support for Kafka clients - #981
• Add support for binary traceparent header format (see the spec for more details) - #1009
• Add support for log correlation for log4j and log4j2, even when not used in combination with slf4j. See [Logging frameworks]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/supported-technologies.md#supported-logging-frameworks) for details.

• Fix parsing value of trace_methods configuration property #930
• Workaround for java.util.logging deadlock #965
• JMS should propagate traceparent header when transactions are not sampled #999
• Spans are not closed if JDBC implementation does not support getUpdateCount #1008

Release date: November 21, 2019

• JMS Enhancements #911:

  • Add special handling for temporary queues/topics

  • Capture message bodies of text Messages

    • Rely on the existing ELASTIC_APM_CAPTURE_BODY agent config option (off by default).
    • Send as context.message.body
    • Limit size to 10000 characters. If longer than this size, trim to 9999 and append with ellipsis

  • Introduce the ignore_message_queues configuration to disable instrumentation (message tagging) for specific queues/topics as suggested in #710

  • Capture predefined message headers and all properties

    • Rely on the existing ELASTIC_APM_CAPTURE_HEADERS agent config option.
    • Send as context.message.headers
    • Sanitize sensitive headers/properties based on the sanitize_field_names config option

• Added support for the MongoDB sync driver. See supported data stores.

• JDBC regression- PreparedStatement#executeUpdate() and PreparedStatement#executeLargeUpdate() are not traced #918
• When systemd cgroup driver is used, the discovered Kubernetes pod UID contains "_" instead of "-" #920
• DB2 jcc4 driver is not traced properly #926

Release date: October 31, 2019

• Add the ability to configure a unique name for a JVM within a service through the service_node_name config option.
• Add ability to ignore some exceptions to be reported as errors <<config-ignore-exceptions[ignore_exceptions]
• Applying new logic for JMS javax.jms.MessageConsumer#receive so that, instead of the transaction created for the polling method itself (ie from receive start to end), the agent will create a transaction attempting to capture the code executed during actual message handling. This logic is suitable for environments where polling APIs are invoked within dedicated polling threads. This polling transaction creation strategy can be reversed through a configuration option (message_polling_transaction_strategy) that is not exposed in the properties file by default.
• Send IP obtained through javax.servlet.ServletRequest#getRemoteAddr() in context.request.socket.remote_address instead of parsing from headers #889
• Added ElasticApmAttacher.attach(String propertiesLocation) to specify a custom properties location
• Logs message when transaction_max_spans has been exceeded #849
• Report the number of affected rows by a SQL statement (UPDATE,DELETE,INSERT) in affected_rows span attribute #707
• Add @Traced annotation which either creates a span or a transaction, depending on the context
• Report JMS destination as a span/transaction context field #906
• Added capture_jmx_metrics configuration option

• JMS creates polling transactions even when the API invocations return without a message
• Support registering MBeans which are added after agent startup

Release date: September 30, 2019

• Add ability to manually specify reported hostname
• Add support for [Redis Jedis client]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/supported-technologies.md#supported-databases).
• Add support for identifying target JVM to attach apm agent to using JVM property. See also the documentation of the [--include and --exclude flags]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/setup-attach-cli.md#setup-attach-cli-usage-options)
• Added [capture_jmx_metrics]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/config-jmx.md#config-capture-jmx-metrics) configuration option
• Improve servlet error capture #812 Among others, now also takes Spring MVC @ExceptionHandlers into account
• Instrument Logger#error(String, Throwable) #821 Automatically captures exceptions when calling logger.error("message", exception)
• Easier log correlation with https://github.com/elastic/java-ecs-logging. See [docs]https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/agent/java/current/log-correlation.html).
• Avoid creating a temp agent file for each attachment #859
• Instrument View#render instead of DispatcherServlet#render #829 This makes the transaction breakdown graph more useful. Instead of dispatcher-servlet, the graph now shows a type which is based on the view name, for example, FreeMarker or Thymeleaf.

• Error in log when setting server_urls to an empty string - co.elastic.apm.agent.configuration.ApmServerConfigurationSource - Expected previousException not to be null
• Avoid terminating the TCP connection to APM Server when polling for configuration updates #823

Release date: August 22, 2019

• Upgrading supported OpenTracing version from 0.31 to 0.33

• Added annotation and meta-annotation matching support for trace_methods, for example:

  • public @java.inject.* org.example.* (for annotation)
  • public @@javax.enterprise.context.NormalScope org.example.* (for meta-annotation)

• The runtime attachment now also works when the tools.jar or the jdk.attach module is not available. This means you don’t need a full JDK installation - the JRE is sufficient. This makes the runtime attachment work in more environments such as minimal Docker containers. Note that the runtime attachment currently does not work for OSGi containers like those used in many application servers such as JBoss and WildFly. See the [documentation]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/setup-attach-cli.md) for more information.

• Support for Hibernate Search

• A warning in logs saying APM server is not available when using 1.8 with APM server 6.x. Due to that, agent 1.8.0 will silently ignore non-string labels, even if used with APM server of versions 6.7.x or 6.8.x that support such. If APM server version is <6.7 or 7.0+, this should have no effect. Otherwise, upgrade the Java agent to 1.9.0+.
• ApacheHttpAsyncClientInstrumentation matching increases startup time considerably
• Log correlation feature is active when active==false
• Tomcat’s memory leak prevention mechanism is causing a…​ memory leak. JDBC statement map is leaking in Tomcat if the application that first used it is undeployed/redeployed. See this related discussion.

Release date: July 30, 2019

• Added support for tracking time spent by span type. Can be disabled by setting breakdown_metrics to false.
• Added support for central configuration. Can be disabled by setting central_config to false.
• Added support for Spring’s JMS flavor - instrumenting org.springframework.jms.listener.SessionAwareMessageListener
• Added support to legacy ApacheHttpClient APIs (which adds support to Axis2 configured to use ApacheHttpClient)
• Added support for setting server_urls dynamically via properties file #723
• Added config_file option
• Added option to use @javax.ws.rs.Path value as transaction name [use_jaxrs_path_as_transaction_name]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/config-jax-rs.md#config-use-jaxrs-path-as-transaction-name)
• Instrument quartz jobs [docs]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/supported-technologies.md#supported-scheduling-frameworks)
• SQL parsing improvements #696
• Introduce priorities for transaction name #748. Now uses the path as transaction name if [use_path_as_transaction_name]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/config-http.md#config-use-path-as-transaction-name) is set to true rather than ServletClass#doGet. But if a name can be determined from a high level framework, like Spring MVC, that takes precedence. User-supplied names from the API always take precedence over any others.
• Use JSP path name as transaction name as opposed to the generated servlet class name #751

• Some JMS Consumers and Producers are filtered due to class name filtering in instrumentation matching
• Jetty: When no display name is set and context path is "/" transaction service names will now correctly fall back to configured values
• JDBC’s executeBatch is not traced
• Drops non-String labels when connected to APM Server < 6.7 to avoid validation errors #687
• Parsing container ID in cloud foundry garden #695
• Automatic instrumentation should not override manual results #752

Release date: June 13, 2019

• Added the trace_methods_duration_threshold config option. When using the trace_methods config option with wild cards, this enables considerable reduction of overhead by limiting the number of spans captured and reported (see more details in config documentation). NOTE: Using wildcards is still not the recommended approach for the trace_methods feature.
• Add Transaction#addCustomContext(String key, String|Number|boolean value) to public API
• Added support for AsyncHttpClient 2.x
• Added global_labels configuration option. This requires APM Server 7.2+.
• Added basic support for JMS- distributed tracing for basic scenarios of send, receive, receiveNoWait and onMessage. Both Queues and Topics are supported. Async send APIs are not supported in this version. NOTE: This feature is currently marked as "experimental" and is disabled by default. In order to enable, it is required to set the disable_instrumentations configuration property to an empty string.
• Improved OSGi support: added a configuration option for bootdelegation packages #641
• Better span names for SQL spans. For example, SELECT FROM user instead of just SELECT #633

• ClassCastException related to async instrumentation of Pilotfish Executor causing thread hang (applied workaround)
• NullPointerException when computing Servlet transaction name with null HTTP method name
• FileNotFoundException when trying to find implementation version of jar with encoded URL
• NullPointerException when closing Apache AsyncHttpClient request producer
• Fixes loading of elasticapm.properties for Spring Boot applications
• Fix startup error on WebLogic 12.2.1.2.0 #649
• Disable metrics reporting and APM Server health check when active=false #653

Release date: April 26, 2019

• Fixes transaction name for non-sampled transactions #581

• Makes log_file option work again #594

• Async context propagation fixes

  • Fixing some async mechanisms lifecycle issues #605
  • Fixes exceptions when using WildFly managed executor services #589
  • Exclude glassfish Executor which does not permit wrapped runnables #596
  • Exclude DumbExecutor #598

• Fixes Manifest version reading error to support jar:file protocol #601

• Fixes transaction name for non-sampled transactions #597

• Fixes potential classloader deadlock by preloading FileSystems.getDefault() #603

Release date: April 16, 2019

• Java APM Agent became part of the Cloud Foundry Java Buildpack as of Release v4.19
• Support Apache HttpAsyncClient - span creation and cross-service trace context propagation
• Added the jvm.thread.count metric, indicating the number of live threads in the JVM (daemon and non-daemon)
• Added support for WebLogic
• Added support for Spring @Scheduled and EJB @Schedule annotations - #569

• Avoid that the agent blocks server shutdown in case the APM Server is not available - #554
• Public API annotations improper retention prevents it from being used with Groovy - #567
• Eliminate side effects of class loading related to Instrumentation matching mechanism

Release date: March 26, 2019

• Added property "allow_path_on_hierarchy" to JAX-RS plugin, to lookup inherited usage of @path

• Support for number and boolean labels in the public API 497. This change also renames tag to label on the API level to be compliant with the Elastic Common Schema (ECS). The addTag(String, String) method is still supported but deprecated in favor of addLabel(String, String). As of version 7.x of the stack, labels will be stored under labels in Elasticsearch. Previously, they were stored under context.tags.

• Support async queries made by Elasticsearch REST client

• Added setStartTimestamp(long epochMicros) and end(long epochMicros) API methods to Span and Transaction, allowing to set custom start and end timestamps.

• Auto-detection of the service_name based on the <display-name> element of the web.xml with a fallback to the servlet context path. If you are using a spring-based application, the agent will use the setting for spring.application.name for its service_name. See the documentation for service_name for more information. Note: this requires APM Server 7.0+. If using previous versions, nothing will change.

• Previously, enabling capture_body could only capture form parameters. Now it supports all UTF-8 encoded plain-text content types. The option [capture_body_content_types]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/config-http.md#config-capture-body-content-types) controls which Content-Types should be captured.

• Support async calls made by OkHttp client (Call#enqueue)

• Added support for providing config options on agent attach.

  • CLI example: --config server_urls=http://localhost:8200,http://localhost:8201
  • API example: ElasticApmAttacher.attach(Map.of("server_urls", "http://localhost:8200,http://localhost:8201"));

• Logging integration through MDC is not working properly - #499
• ClassCastException with adoptopenjdk/openjdk11-openj9 - #505
• Span count limitation is not working properly - reported in our forum
• Java agent causes Exceptions in Alfresco cluster environment due to failure in the instrumentation of Hazelcast Executors - reported in our forum

Release date: February 14, 2019

• Added support for sync calls of OkHttp client
• Added support for context propagation for java.util.concurrent.ExecutorServices
• The trace_methods configuration now allows to omit the method matcher. Example: com.example.* traces all classes and methods within the com.example package and sub-packages.
• Added support for JSF. Tested on WildFly, WebSphere Liberty and Payara with embedded JSF implementation and on Tomcat and Jetty with MyFaces 2.2 and 2.3
• Introduces a new configuration option disable_metrics which disables the collection of metrics via a wildcard expression.
• Support for HttpUrlConnection
• Adds subtype and action to spans. This replaces former typing mechanism where type, subtype and action were all set through the type in an hierarchical dotted-syntax. In order to support existing API usages, dotted types are parsed into subtype and action, however Span.createSpan and Span.setType are deprecated starting this version. Instead, type-less spans can be created using the new Span.startSpan API and typed spans can be created using the new Span.startSpan(String type, String subtype, String action) API
• Support for JBoss EAP 6.4, 7.0, 7.1 and 7.2
• Improved startup times
• Support for SOAP (JAX-WS). SOAP client create spans and propagate context. Transactions are created for @WebService classes and @WebMethod methods.

• Fixes a failure in BitBucket when agent deployed #349
• Fixes increased CPU consumption #453 and #443
• Fixed some OpenTracing bridge functionalities that were not working when auto-instrumentation is disabled
• Fixed an error occurring when ending an OpenTracing span before deactivating
• Sending proper null for metrics that have a NaN value
• Fixes JVM crash with Java 7 #458
• Fixes an application deployment failure when using EclipseLink and trace_methods configuration #474

Release date: January 10, 2019

• The agent now collects system and JVM metrics #360
• Add API methods ElasticApm#startTransactionWithRemoteParent and Span#injectTraceHeaders to allow for manual context propagation #396.
• Added trace_methods configuration option which lets you define which methods in your project or 3rd party libraries should be traced. To create spans for all public methods of classes whose name ends in Service which are in a sub-package of org.example.services use this matcher: public org.example.services.*.*Service#* #398
• Added span for DispatcherServlet#render #409.
• Flush reporter on shutdown to make sure all recorded Spans are sent to the server before the program exits #397
• Adds Kubernetes #383 and Docker metadata to, enabling correlation with the Kibana Infra UI.
• Improved error handling of the Servlet Async API #399
• Support async API’s used with AsyncContext.start #388

• Fixing a potential memory leak when there is no connection with APM server
• Fixes NoSuchMethodError CharBuffer.flip() which occurs when using the Elasticsearch RestClient and Java 7 or 8 #401

Release date: December 19, 2018

• Added capture_headers configuration option. Set to false to disable capturing request and response headers. This will reduce the allocation rate of the agent and can save you network bandwidth and disk space.
• Makes the API methods addTag, setName, setType, setUser and setResult fluent, so that calls can be chained.

• Catch all errors thrown within agent injected code
• Enable public APIs and OpenTracing bridge to work properly in OSGi systems, fixes this WildFly issue
• Remove module-info.java to enable agent working on early Tomcat 8.5 versions
• Fix async Servlet API issue

Release date: November 28, 2018

• Some memory allocation improvements
• Enabling bootdelegation for agent classes in Atlassian OSGI systems

• Update dsl-json which fixes a memory leak. See ngs-doo/dsl-json#102 for details.
• Avoid VerifyErrors by non instrumenting classes compiled for Java 4 or earlier
• Enable APM Server URL configuration with path (fixes #339)
• Reverse system.hostname and system.platform order sent to APM server

Release date: November 15, 2018

• Fixes NoSuchMethodError CharBuffer.flip() which occurs when using the Elasticsearch RestClient and Java 7 or 8 #313

Release date: November 14, 2018

• Adds @CaptureTransaction and @CaptureSpan annotations which let you declaratively add custom transactions and spans. Note that it is required to configure the application_packages for this to work. See the [documentation]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/public-api.md#api-annotation) for more information.
• The public API now supports to activate a span on the current thread. This makes the span available via ElasticApm#currentSpan() Refer to the [documentation]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/public-api.md#api-span-activate) for more details.
• Capturing of Elasticsearch RestClient 5.0.2+ calls. Currently, the *Async methods are not supported, only their synchronous counterparts.
• Added API methods to enable correlating the spans created from the JavaScrip Real User Monitoring agent with the Java agent transaction. More information can be found in the [documentation]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/public-api.md#api-ensure-parent-id).
• Added Transaction.isSampled() and Span.isSampled() methods to the public API
• Added Transaction#setResult to the public API #293
• Support for Distributed Tracing
• Adds @CaptureTransaction and @CaptureSpan annotations which let you declaratively add custom transactions and spans. Note that it is required to configure the application_packages for this to work. See the [documentation]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/public-api.md#api-annotation) for more information.
• The public API now supports to activate a span on the current thread. This makes the span available via ElasticApm#currentSpan() Refer to the [documentation]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/public-api.md#api-span-activate) for more details.
• Capturing of Elasticsearch RestClient 5.0.2+ calls. Currently, the *Async methods are not supported, only their synchronous counterparts.
• Added API methods to enable correlating the spans created from the JavaScrip Real User Monitoring agent with the Java agent transaction. More information can be found in the [documentation]/apm-agent-java/docs/reference/public-api.md#api-ensure-parent-id).
• Microsecond accurate timestamps #261
• Support for JAX-RS annotations. Transactions are named based on your resources (ResourceClass#resourceMethod).

• Fix for situations where status code is reported as 200, even though it actually was 500 #225
• Capturing the username now properly works when using Spring security #183
• Fix for situations where status code is reported as 200, even though it actually was 500 #225