Best PHP Application Monitoring Tools in 2023

According to W3Tech, around 80% of the websites run PHP. PHP also powers popular content management systems like Drupal, or WordPress. Its popularity lies in open-source nature, lightweight structure, and features.

PHP Applications Performance Monitoring tools enable code-level observability, faster recovery, troubleshooting, and easier maintenance of your service.

Let’s take a look at the best PHP application monitoring tools and software in 2023.

1. Better Stack

Better Stack is as structured log management platform based on ClickHouse. It allows you to start collecting and monitoring data in real-time from any PHP application via a simple Better Stack client library. Better Stack's advanced built-in collaboration features, resource-efficient ClickHouse, and visually pleasing, dark-mode UI help you to spend less time debugging and focus on shipping higher-quality software faster.

Better Stack Logs is a part of the Better Stack ecosystem, and together with Better Stack Uptime, they create a complete observability solution with incident management built-in. With one-click Better Uptime integration, you can easily alert on-call team members of any irregularities in your application's behavior. Be it a specific log message error or a predefined usage trend.

2. New Relic

New Relic's PHP application performance monitoring helps with identifying and troubleshooting performance issues. It tracks key transactions, monitors critical metrics, and visualizes everything in dashboards. New Relic's PHP monitoring promises improved performance, query optimization, and instant observability.

3. Sentry.io

Sentry.io, originally built for python frameworks now enables performance monitoring of a wide variety of languages and frameworks. PHP Error monitoring allows you to gather data about performance bottlenecks, errors, and exceptions, which helps in monitoring, issue resolution, and efficient debugging. Sentry offers support for PHP, Laravel, and Symfony.

Sentry enables end-to-end observability and collects complete stack traces. It gathers data in context and allows you to filter and group data with ease.

4. PHP Server Monitor

PHP server monitor is an open-source tool to monitor the performance of PHP servers and websites. It’s a script checking whether the website and server are up. IT collects and visualizes data in a web-based, simplistic, old-style interface allowing you to manage connections and users.

It allows for easy cronjob monitoring, email, SMS and Pushover notifications, Basic logs collection, and more.

5. Atatus

Atatus is an APM tool supporting PHP performance monitoring and error handling. Using the Atatus PHP Monitoring tool, you can gain actionable insights into root cause issues, improve business metrics, and optimize the performance of your application. It discovers the longest transactions, the slowest database queries, the slowest network calls, and exceptions that affect your users.

6. ManageEngine APM

ManageEngine allows you to monitor PHP performance and evaluate the end-user experience, overview the APDEX score, and monitor Important parameters such as response time, throughput, and exceptions that can show a lot about a PHP server and its applications. ManageEngine brings insights into database operations, such as database transaction response time, how many times it is called, and throughput details. You can easily identify an operation that is taking longer. PHP Performance Monitor Agent also provides information about SQL transactions, where you can also identify slow queries.

7. Stackify

Retrace is a code-level APM solution including PHP monitoring features. It’s tracking performance-related issues via continuous monitoring and testing and brings you summaries and reports on any performance issues or anomalies allowing you to take action. Retrace allows you to monitor Error and average load time, requests per minute, APDEX, and App Score, which is a new, holistic rating based on multiple other metrics.

8. Instana

Instana allows you to monitor PHP apps and infrastructure with end-to-end observability. It monitors average latency, error rate, and requests per second and captures every call passing via the application, to make sure a complete log is attached to each potential error. PHP will automatically detect PHP components such as CGI and FPM on the monitored system and use the appropriate sensor.

9. Dynatrace

Dynatrace tracks the entire application stack using their OneAgent. It captures every transaction and relevant metrics, SQL statements, and lines of code and visualizes them in pre-configured dashboards. Dynatrace offers support for performance monitoring of PHO-based apps like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Magento.

10. Datadog

Datadog’s PHP APM features allow you to optimize performance and troubleshoot issues in order to keep SLAs and SLOs. You can pinpoint any performance issues in PHP services via their automatically generated map and monitor PHP apps at any level, including app, endpoint, and user-level with Trace Search and Analytics. Datadog also allows you to spot unknown issues and configure smart alerts, create composite alerting, and export alerts to third-party solutions.

Datadog supports Laravel, Zend, and Symfony and auto-instruments common PHP libraries such as CURL, Guzzle, and PDO.

11. Site24x7 APM insights

Site24x7’s PHP performance monitoring use traces to identify methods with performance issues and fetches their execution details. Traces are charted and visualize the sequence of invocations. It can also identify SQL queries and identify poorly performing database queries. Site24x7 offers both APM and RUM and suggests integrating these two together to obtain a complete performance overview.

12. AppOptics

AppOptics is an APM tool from SolarWinds allowing you to monitor PHP apps and handle errors. It enables real-time application monitoring and full observability across distributed apps. It monitors how remote calls, frameworks, and user-defined methods affect overall PHP performance and PHP memory footprint. It also discovers performance-related issues, and allows for code-level analysis or crafting of custom plugins.

13. Raygun

Raygun offers web application performance and error monitoring for PHP applications. Raygun provides you with real-time application performance-related issues for both web and mobile applications. It also collects metrics about customer experience, monitors errors and crashes, and provides code-level insights on any outages. You can deploy Raygun alongside RUM and Crash reporting to obtain a full-observability, client-focused monitoring solution

Conclusion

While PHP might not be the hottest language in the dev community, it’s here to stay. Platforms such as Facebook's Hack might suggest, that PHP is far from peaking or being replaced and the market adapts to this fact. APM for PHP projects is essential for a sustianable and secure maintenance of applications in the long run. That being said, there is no reason to neglect PHP monitoring, especially in the current cyber climate. The market offers a plethora of open-source, premium, but also start-up, business, and enterprise/government-fit applications.