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.
Logtail 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
Logtail client library. Logtail'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.
Logtail is a part of the Better Stack ecosystem, and
together with Better 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.