Need ability to ignore properties of object parameters

[seth-admittedly]

It's pretty common to have object parameters in a route, e.g., a user. Currently all the properties of that object are captured if parameter capturing is enabled. There needs to be a way to ignore certain properties, e.g., user.password.

[othiym23]

This already exists! Look at ignored_params for newrelic.js, or NEW_RELIC_IGNORED_PARAMS if you're configuring via environment variables.

Thanks for using the agent!

[seth-admittedly]

What's the syntax for ignoring an object's parameter? I can ignore the
password parameter with ["password"] but the user object still gets
captured with the password property. I tried ["password","user.password"]
but with no success.

On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 3:24 PM, Forrest L Norvell <[email protected]

wrote:

Closed #92 #92.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/92
.

Lead Developer@admittedly

[seth-admittedly]

[othiym23]

I'm with you now. Sorry for missing that detail earlier!

Firstly, if you want to ensure that you're not capturing sensitive data with slow transaction traces, for now I'd suggest that you set capture_params to false (which is its default state).

This is a real issue, but also sort of an edge case. We have some ideas as to how to fix this, but since parameter filtering is something that is potentially done many times per request, it needs to be done in the simplest way possible to avoid causing significant performance regressions. It might be a little while before we can get to this, hence the recommendation in the previous paragraph. Thanks for the report, though, and we'll see what we can do.

[seth-admittedly]

Yeah, definitely have parameter capture off in production. Would be great
to have this feature though so we could enable it.

On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 4:42 PM, Forrest L Norvell <[email protected]

wrote:

Reopened #92 #92.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/92
.

Lead Developer@admittedly

[othiym23]

This is something that every New Relic agent handles slightly differently, and right now it appears that we'd be pioneering filtering nested properties, if we do decide to implement it.

The approach I have in mind involves cloning the parameters object, specifying parameters as strings using dot notation to denote the object graph (user.password), splitting on '.', and then recursively descending the parameters to find (and delete) matches. To work properly, filtering should be deferred until the trace is selected for delivery to New Relic (because otherwise the per-request performance hit is... pretty significant).

This has some knock-on architectural considerations that mean that it's a nontrivial project, and as such probably needs to be put on our project roadmap and not done as a simple bug fix. I'll add it to our roadmapping tool, and then it'll be up to our product manager to figure out its priority. You (and anyone else who stumbles across this issue) can help that process along by opening a support ticket and describing why this is a problem for you as concretely as possible.

[txase]

Hi @seth-admittedly,

We're doing some github issue cleanup. We're continuing to track your issue internally as a feature request. At this time, there is nothing more actionable for us to do with this issue, so we are closing it.

Thank you for your understanding as we tidy up our issues!