January Launch Notes: First paint preview, provider updates, and more

By Freyja Spaven | Posted Feb 7, 2020 | 3 min. (595 words)

Raygun’s Launch Notes are your regular round-up of all the improvements we made to Raygun last month — from major features to performance updates.

Real User Monitoring

Preview: First paint and first contentful paint metrics

raygun previews first paint metrics

With the release of our new first paint and first contentful paint metrics for RUM, you’ll be able to get a more granular understanding of how users experience your application. This exciting new update will include:

Support for first paint and first contentful paint metrics
A new line graph on the main performance page so it’s easier to spot trends over time
A new histogram so you can drill into the page load distribution of a specific page

We’ve already started the beta, and we will be releasing the feature in the next few weeks. Watch this space!

New version of Raygun4JS

Update to the latest JavaScript provider to get all the benefits of our first paint and first contentful paint metrics.

Bug fixes

We’ve polished up the app with numerous bug fixes and performance updates.

Crash Reporting

PHP provider update

The new Raygun4PHP provider has a host of new improvements, including:

Better support for servers without cURL installed
More reliable data transport through Guzzle
Support for PHP 7.1+

To get all the benefits of v2.0, you’ll need to update your composer.json file with 2.0 manually.

APM

Agent updates

The latest release of the Raygun APM Agent and profiler contains a fix which results in significant performance improvements, including a 50% profile reduction time for blacklisting. This release also includes general bug fixes for the agent.

We strongly recommend updating to this version to get all the performance benefits.

Improvements to the page segment rules

With the new page segment rules, APM customers can now choose the grouping of your URLs and domains as you see fit.

Ruby support for APM is underway

Raygun APM is already exciting the .NET and .NET Core communities by providing a developer-friendly product that excels in delivering the necessary details needed to fix problems quickly.

For the last couple of months, we’ve been busy beta testing Raygun APM for Ruby so that we can bring precise trace-level details to our Ruby customers. Here’s what we’ve been working on:

Fast installation with no build environment dependencies
Reduction of memory overhead of the profiler by 20%
Reduction of Docker image size by 40%
Significant reduction in idle CPU consumption
Further additions to the framework (Rails) and Ruby core standard library blacklists for reducing noise in traces

Interested in giving Raygun APM for Ruby beta a go? You can request beta access here.

Support for Node.js is about to start

Raygun APM for Node.js beta is also just around the corner. To request beta access, make sure to register your interest so you will be notified when it’s ready for testing.

General updates

Performance Matters

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Did you miss any of these features from 2019?

From improved language support to better performance, in 2019, we released a host of new features across our three products designed to help you provide better digital customer experiences. Read on to see how our favorite features from 2019 will benefit you in 2020 and beyond.