Custom transaction names stopped working and warning message

Elastic Observability APM
1

We had apm working in an app, which is built on Lucee CFML (https://lucee.org/) . Which is a scripting language on the JVM. The app runs in tomcat, but because the script engine only exposes a single servlet we need to set a custom transaction name in the app. This was working fine with earlier version of apm, but upgrading to 1.0.1 seems to have broken it and we now get an error in the logs. Heres some details

In our onRequestStart handler we do

ElasticApm.currentTransaction().setName(txName);

Where ElasticAPM is a singleton instance of the co.elastic.apm.api.ElasticApm . Previously that was all we needed, and we got our custom tx name in apm. Now however, we still get data in apm, but all transactions are named CFMLServlet#doGet or CFMLServlet#doPost etc

In the server logs/console we get the stack trace below. I've truncated the trace, but it starts from /Application.cfc:129, which is the location in our code where we call ElasticApm.currentTransaction().setName(txName);

If this is better posted on github, then happy to move it over there

[edit]
I forgot to add environment info

openjdk version "1.8.0_181"
Apache Tomcat/7.0.59

2018-11-27 10:40:14.471 [http-bio-8080-exec-9] WARN co.elastic.apm.bci.bytebuddy.ErrorLoggingListener - ERROR on transformation co.elastic.apm.api.TransactionImpl
java.lang.IllegalStateException: Cannot locate field named span for class co.elastic.apm.api.TransactionImpl
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.asm.Advice$OffsetMapping$ForField$Unresolved.resolve(Advice.java:2177)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.asm.Advice$OffsetMapping$ForField.resolve(Advice.java:2121)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.asm.Advice$Dispatcher$Inlining$Resolved$ForMethodEnter.doApply(Advice.java:7664)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.asm.Advice$Dispatcher$Inlining$Resolved$ForMethodEnter$WithDiscardedEnterType.doApply(Advice.java:7756)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.asm.Advice$Dispatcher$Inlining$Resolved$ForMethodEnter.apply(Advice.java:7625)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.asm.Advice$Dispatcher$Inlining$Resolved$AdviceMethodInliner.visitMethod(Advice.java:7334)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.jar.asm.ClassReader.readMethod(ClassReader.java:1113)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.jar.asm.ClassReader.accept(ClassReader.java:679)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.jar.asm.ClassReader.accept(ClassReader.java:391)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.asm.Advice$Dispatcher$Inlining$Resolved$AdviceMethodInliner.apply(Advice.java:7328)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.asm.Advice$AdviceVisitor.onAfterExceptionTable(Advice.java:9376)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.utility.visitor.ExceptionTableSensitiveMethodVisitor.considerEndOfExceptionTable(ExceptionTableSensitiveMethodVisitor.java:49)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.utility.visitor.ExceptionTableSensitiveMethodVisitor.visitLabel(ExceptionTableSensitiveMethodVisitor.java:62)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.jar.asm.Label.accept(Label.java:357)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.jar.asm.ClassReader.readCode(ClassReader.java:1815)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.jar.asm.ClassReader.readMethod(ClassReader.java:1275)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.jar.asm.ClassReader.accept(ClassReader.java:679)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.jar.asm.ClassReader.accept(ClassReader.java:391)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.dynamic.scaffold.TypeWriter$Default$ForInlining.create(TypeWriter.java:3393)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.dynamic.scaffold.TypeWriter$Default.make(TypeWriter.java:1930)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.dynamic.scaffold.inline.RedefinitionDynamicTypeBuilder.make(RedefinitionDynamicTypeBuilder.java:207)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.agent.builder.AgentBuilder$Default$Transformation$Simple$Resolution.apply(AgentBuilder.java:10050)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.agent.builder.AgentBuilder$Default$ExecutingTransformer.doTransform(AgentBuilder.java:10469)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.agent.builder.AgentBuilder$Default$ExecutingTransformer.transform(AgentBuilder.java:10432)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.agent.builder.AgentBuilder$Default$ExecutingTransformer.access$1500(AgentBuilder.java:10198)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.agent.builder.AgentBuilder$Default$ExecutingTransformer$LegacyVmDispatcher.run(AgentBuilder.java:10807)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.agent.builder.AgentBuilder$Default$ExecutingTransformer$LegacyVmDispatcher.run(AgentBuilder.java:10754)
	at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
	at co.elastic.apm.shaded.bytebuddy.agent.builder.AgentBuilder$Default$ExecutingTransformer.transform(AgentBuilder.java:10355)
	at sun.instrument.TransformerManager.transform(TransformerManager.java:188)
	at sun.instrument.InstrumentationImpl.transform(InstrumentationImpl.java:428)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:763)
	at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:142)
	at org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappClassLoader.findClassInternal(WebappClassLoader.java:2957)
	at org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappClassLoader.findClass(WebappClassLoader.java:1210)
	at org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappClassLoader.loadClass(WebappClassLoader.java:1690)
	at org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappClassLoader.loadClass(WebappClassLoader.java:1571)
	at co.elastic.apm.api.ElasticApm.currentTransaction(ElasticApm.java:94)
	at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
	at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:62)
	at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43)
	at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:498)
	at lucee.runtime.reflection.pairs.MethodInstance.invoke(MethodInstance.java:55)
	at lucee.runtime.java.JavaObject.call(JavaObject.java:246)
	at lucee.runtime.java.JavaObject.call(JavaObject.java:268)
	at lucee.runtime.util.VariableUtilImpl.callFunctionWithoutNamedValues(VariableUtilImpl.java:756)
	at lucee.runtime.PageContextImpl.getFunction(PageContextImpl.java:1718)
	at application_cfc$cf.udfCall1(/Application.cfc:129)
2

Could it be that you are using an older version of the apm-agent-api module? Updating that to the latest version should fix the problem.

3

no, we're using elastic-agent-api 1.0.1 and the same version of the agent

4

Hmm, that's somewhat strange :thinking:

In version 1.0.1, there is actually a span property in TransactionImpl's superclass SpanImpl:

However in previous versions, there was no property called span, as it was called transaction.

Could you double check that you are using the current version of this artifact: Maven Central Repository Search

5

My bad. I did a find ./src | grep apm and it spat out an old jar in a lib directory where it had no right to be hiding. Now works as expected, thank you!

However,I do get the following warning on the first request

2018-11-29 21:55:17.668 [http-bio-8080-exec-1] WARN co.elastic.apm.bci.bytebuddy.ErrorLoggingListener - ERROR on transformation lucee.runtime.net.http.HTTPServletRequestWrap
java.lang.IllegalStateException: Cannot resolve type description for javax.servlet.http.HttpUpgradeHandler

The src for that class would be here - https://github.com/lucee/Lucee/blob/master/core/src/main/java/lucee/runtime/net/http/HTTPServletRequestWrap.java

6

Warnings with the message Cannot resolve type description for are not something to worry about. The reason in this case is that Tomcat 7 ships with the Servlet API 3.0, but HTTPServletRequestWrap.java referrrs to classes of the servlet api 3.1, which are not present in Tomcat.

7

This pull request should remove the warning for that as it does not try to resolve the missing class anymore: https://github.com/elastic/apm-agent-java/pull/363

To get notified of the next release, go to https://github.com/elastic/apm-agent-java, click on watch and select "Releases only".

Thanks for reporting!

8

Thankyou @felixbarny

9

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