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July 18, 2024

PHP Monitoring: How to Improve PHP Observability Practices

Massimiliano Cavicchioli
Massimiliano Cavicchioli

PHP Development

PHP monitoring allows developers to monitor the performance of their apps and quickly respond to any problems as soon as they arise. This offers more control to developers and ensures that end users have an optimal experience when using a PHP application.

While most companies have some level of PHP monitoring or PHP observability in place, not all organizations have applied it well. In this blog, we give an overview of the benefits of a good PHP monitoring strategy, outline evaluation criteria for choosing the right PHP monitoring tools, and discuss how Zend can support your PHP monitoring efforts.

Table of Contents

  1. Why PHP Monitoring Matters
  2. PHP Monitoring Tools: Which Is Best for Your Application?
  3. How to Improve PHP Monitoring
  4. Final Thoughts 
  5. Additional Resources 
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Why PHP Monitoring Matters

Every organization should have a well-implemented PHP monitoring solution for their mission-critical PHP apps. This allows DevOps teams (and the organization as a whole) to resolve issues and PHP performance bottlenecks efficiently and reduce Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR).

This has a substantial impact on the bottom line of the business, as organizations do not have to deal with the unnecessary work involved in maintaining an extensive software analysis group.

What Is PHP Monitoring?

PHP monitoring allows insight into application health, by providing notifications when certain conditions occur, such as high CPU usage, high memory usage, slow requests, execution errors, and more.

You may either passively get details on events or issues by using the visualizations tools provided by a vendor, or you may setup the delivery of notifications to you actively on the channels of choice (SMS, email, Slack, ticket systems, etc.).

Issue Detection and Debugging With PHP Observability Systems

Related to the concept of MTTR, the ability to detect and debug an issue, as close as possible to the initial development phase of the software development lifecycle, or SDLC, is one of the most important features of a PHP monitoring system.

In order to fulfill the objectives, an enterprise-level PHP monitoring system must provide the capacity to drill down into call stack traces to diagnose performance bottlenecks, auto-discover business transactions, complete dynamic baselining, and run code-level diagnostics.

These functionalities will ensure a rapid issue identification and resolution to maintain an ideal user experience for any mission-critical PHP application, running on-premises or in the cloud.

PHP Monitoring and Performance Optimization

In today’s digital world, faster troubleshooting isn’t enough. A great user experience is paramount for the success of a web application. Therefore, a valuable PHP monitoring system must guarantee a large set of data points, as intelligently aggregated as possible, related to areas of the execution that are not performing optimally.

Those areas include:

  • Scope Analysis of Degradations - Which users are impacted by applications performance issues, for which transactions, when and how often?  
  • Fault Isolation - Identify the infrastructure layer responsible for the application performance degradation across network, endpoint, secured gateway, load balancers, front- and back-end servers) to direct the case to the right team for in-depth root cause analysis and performance management.
  • Root cause analysis - Pinpoint the change, defect, or parameter which is creating the slow processing or errors.

PHP Monitoring to Detect Security Issues and Vulnerabilities

As your PHP apps succeed and grow, your services scale in number and complexity. This makes it difficult to maintain a rapid pace of innovation while keeping your applications secure. It’s particularly challenging to respond to attacks, as DevOps and security teams need to collaborate to understand each attack’s root cause and remediate the vulnerabilities that enabled it.

It becomes paramount to be able to identify risks from known vulnerabilities in third-party libraries and services, assuring that the only attack surface is limited to the proprietary logic developed in-house under the full control of DevOps and security teams.

A PHP app monitoring system can help teams to:

  • Identify services/libraries exposed to security risks
  • Understand those vulnerabilities
  • See which elements have been exposed to attacks
  • Mitigate active threats

Stay Up to Date on the Latest CVEs

Zend is dedicated to keeping PHP applications secure against the latest CVEs. Our PHP Security Center allows your team to quickly assess vulnerabilities and exposures by version, type, and severity.

Visit the PHP Security Center 

PHP Monitoring Improves Availability and Uptime

Another topic that has great business relevance is app availability, especially for critical PHP apps. Availability and Uptime must be analyzed ahead of time through the following lenses: 

  • Figure out your SLAs
  • Determine the cost to your business when SLAs are violated in terms of lost revenue, brand antipathy, and even the loss of customer lifetime revenue
  • Make a case for the ‘Line of Business’ decision makers

A state-of-the-art PHP monitoring system must be able to feed valuable and unequivocal data towards the analysis mentioned above, facilitating data-driven decisions for business leaders.

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PHP Monitoring Tools: Which Is Best for Your Application?

When choosing PHP monitoring tools, always take the time to evaluate your goals and the tools at your disposal to ensure you’ve selected the best fit for your application and PHP monitoring strategy. It is important to emphasize some processes-related characteristics a PHP monitoring solution must unequivocally satisfy. These characteristics include:

  1. Easy to install in all components
  2. Easy to integrate in DevOps pipelines, bringing added value to such processes
  3. Enhancing the development experience
  4. High degree of configurability in order to tailor the various PHP APM features exactly to the needs of an application
  5. Easy visualization of actionable data

Pricing, PHP monitoring requirements, fitting into existing processes and observability tools, and how the PHP apps are deployed and consumed by the end users also impact which PHP monitoring solution is best for your applications.

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How to Improve PHP Monitoring

There is no one-size-fits-all answer when it comes to selecting and implementing the right PHP monitoring tool for your web app. PHP applications can be complicated, and they require robust monitoring solutions that fit your team's skill set, available resources, goals, and more.

Zend is here to help. We offer flexible PHP monitoring tools and support services to detect issues or vulnerabilities, schedule security updates, and improve your application's performance through advanced monitoring capabilities.

Customizable PHP Monitoring With ZendHQ

Modern PHP apps can become complex, and scaling these apps to meet demand isn't always as straightforward (or cheap) as teams hope. A PHP APM solution like ZendHQ makes it easy for your team to monitor, inspect, optimize, automate, secure, and scale your PHP apps.

PHP Monitoring

ZendHQ detects issues before they become big troubles, in a very configurable way that minimizes false positives.

Learn More About ZendHQ Observability and Monitoring >>

Code Tracing

Do you need to see the entire backtrace of a problematic event (including values in and out for functions/methods) in a proactive fashion? ZendHQ code tracing immediately becomes a lifesaver for extremely difficult issues to debug, especially in production where things are not easily reproducible.

Learn More About ZendHQ Code Tracing >>

Automation

Easily automate and manage the installation and configuration of all PHP APM components tailored to any application needs, in every environment of your SDLC.

Learn More About ZendHQ Automation >>

JobQueue

As a great enhancer for performance and scalability, ZendHQ provides a state-of-the-art queuing system for async or long-running tasks that can be used directly from your proprietary code.

Learn More About ZendHQ JobQueue >>

Try ZendHQ PHP Observability Tooling Free for 30 Days

ZendHQ, an extension for ZendPHP, delivers the building blocks for modern, scalable, and secure PHP apps. Try both free for 30 days, no strings attached.

Start Your Trial  More About ZendPHP

Continuous PHP Monitoring With Admin as a Service

If you want to take the stress out of PHP monitoring and PHP observability strategies, you can do so with Zend Admin as a Service. Our dedicated team keeps your PHP runtime secure and updated while providing continuous performance, security, and stability monitoring. With Admin as a Service, the Zend PHP experts become your PHP experts, offering:

  • An intuitive and easy-to-navigate dashboard
  • Reduced ownership costs associated with maintaining PHP runtimes
  • Guided installation and configurations
  • Scheduled security patches and updates
  • Ensured compliance for all regulations
  • Uninterrupted performance monitoring with personalized tuning and prompt failure alerts
  • Weekly reports delivered directly to your inbox

Overall, the service is designed to allow you to concentrate solely on your business objectives, with a plethora of data points delivered by us to substantially help with the achievement of such objectives.

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Final Thoughts 

In summary, a good PHP monitoring strategy can pay dividends for many organizations. By making it easier to continuously improve user experience, optimize performance, and improve security, a well-applied PHP monitoring strategy can make the SDLC (and decision-making process) more efficient and ultimately more effective.

That said, it's important to get it right. Choosing the right tool, such as ZendHQ or Zend Admin as a Service, and deploying it to its full benefit is critical to achieving the benefits described above.

Note: This blog was originally published on July 13, 2023, and has been expanded to include updated information.

Exploring Your PHP Monitoring Options? 

ZendHQ and Zend Admin as a Service deliver comprehensive performance monitoring for PHP applications. Learn more at the links below.

Explore ZendHQ  Discover Admin as a Service

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Additional Resources 

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