Today, we released version 2.0 of the Skylight Agent. 2.0 doesn't introduce any new APIs, but we did rewrite the SQL Lexer to support more varieties of queries. We also spent a lot of time on internal refactoring and improved our error logging. Since we follow semantic versioning, we also took the opportunity to drop support for some older dependencies and environments. Read on for more information about upgrading as well as some technical details on our internal changes.

Upgrading

As a new major release, the Skylight Agent does include some breaking changes, namely the removal of support for some older libraries, Ruby versions, and glibc versions. We also made some API changes around enabling Probes and Normalizers.

To ease the upgrade, the newly released 1.7 version of the agent includes deprecation warnings for most changes. If you app runs without deprecation warnings you'll likely be able to upgrade to 2.0 without issue.

The only change that we don't have a check for is the glibc version dependency. In general, if you're running on a still maintained version of Linux you should be ok. If you're unsure run ldd --version and make sure it is 2.15 or greater. (Of course, if you're using musl or FreeBSD you won't have to worry about this!)

If you're stuck on an old version of a library or of Linux, don't worry, we plan to keep the 1.x agent operational as long as we're able. That said, we do strongly encourage you to upgrade!

Improvements

SQL Lexer

It's been completely rewritten which means that we'll be able to recognize more types of SQL queries. We've already written a bit about this in the 2.0 Beta post so head over there if you want more details.

Logging and Error Handling

By and large, the agent is quite stable and runs without issue. However, in the rare situations where there are issues it can sometimes be a bit hard to get the information that we need. We've done a good bit of logging cleanup and standardization which will make it much easier to hunt down any issues.

For more information on the specific changes, you can always take a look at the CHANGELOG.

If, for some reason, you decided to read this even though you aren’t a Skylight user, you should become one! If you are already using Skylight, consider referring a friend to try out the latest goodness, and get a $50 Skylight credit for both of you!