Improvements
- Kafka-clients - The Java agent now supports the kafka-clients library. The agent will automatically report up Kafka metrics to New Relic. - Optional support is provided for reporting Kafka metrics as Insights events and for enabling distributed tracing. More information can be found in the New Relic documentation. 
- Java 12, Coretto and Zulu - The New Relic Java agent is now fully compatible with Java 12. This release also adds support for the Amazon Coretto and Azul Zulu JDKs. 
New APIs
- Added ignoreErrors() to the Transaction API, allowing all errors reported within a specific transaction to be ignored.
- Added addCustomParameters(Map<String, Object>) API, allowing multiple custom parameters to be added to a transaction at once.
- Updated the noticeError() API documentation to clarify that when the api is invoked multiple times while in a transaction, only the first error will be reported.
Deprecated APIs
- The custom transport channel API is now deprecated in favor of the Distributed Tracing API.
- The skipTransactionTrace attribute on the @Trace annotation is now deprecated. The excludeFromTransactionTrace attribute should be used in its place.
Deprecated Instrumentation
- JetS3t - Removed built-in instrumentation for JetS3t. The agent will continue to report external calls made with the JetS3t client. 
Fixes
- Fixed an issue with Jax-RS subresource transaction naming where the root path is duplicated when a nested resource structure is used. This could lead to transactions being named incorrectly for incoming requests to a Jax-RS framework.
- Fixed a bug in the agent's Jetty metric sampling that could prevent Jetty specific metrics from being reported when the number of threads returned by JMX is zero.
- Fixed a NullPointerException that can occur when cross application tracing configuration is explicitly disabled.
- Fixed an issue where transactions would be named incorrectly when using custom Akka Http stream directives or a pathEnd directive followed by a Segment directive.
- Fixed an issue where certain usages of Akka and Scala would prevent transactions from being reported to New Relic. This would also manifest as a NullPointerException in the agent log at finestlevel.
- The Java agent no longer includes Jaxb or Logback dependencies. A new dependency on Log4j2 has been added