Why Good PHP Monitoring Matters

Application performance management (APM) 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 an app.

While most companies have some level of application monitoring in place, not all organizations have applied it well. In this blog, we give an overview of the benefits of a good PHP application monitoring strategy, the tools that can be used, and how to get started building out and maintaining an effective PHP monitoring strategy.

The Importance of PHP Monitoring

PHP application performance monitoring is important for several reasons (these are just a few of them):

Enhancing User Experience

APM helps to ensure that applications are performing well and meeting user expectations. Slow or poorly performing applications can lead to frustration and dissatisfaction among users, which can ultimately impact business revenue and reputation

Improving Application Reliability

APM helps to identify and address issues that may be impacting the reliability of applications. By detecting and resolving issues proactively, APM can help to prevent downtime and ensure that applications are available when they are needed.

Optimizing Resource Utilization

APM provides insights into the resource utilization of applications, which can help organizations to optimize their infrastructure and reduce costs.

Supporting DevOps Practices

APM can be integrated into DevOps workflows to help teams identify and resolve issues quickly. By providing visibility into the performance of applications, APM can help to ensure that changes are made with confidence and that applications are deployed successfully.

Meeting SLAs

APM can help organizations to meet service level agreements (SLAs) by ensuring that applications are performing well and meeting performance targets. 

Why PHP Applications Need Monitoring

Every organization should have a well-implemented PHP APM 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.

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

You may either passively get details on events/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

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 SDLC, is one of the most important features of an APM system.

I order to fulfill the objectives, an enterprise level APM system must provide the capacity to drill down into call stack traces to diagnose performance bottlenecks, auto-discover business transactions, dynamic baselining and 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.

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 APM 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.

Read our article on how to improve PHP performance >>

Security and Vulnerabilities Detection

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.

An APM 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

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 APM must be able to feed valuable and unequivocal data towards the analysis mentioned above, facilitating data-driven decisions for business leaders.

Popular PHP Monitoring Tools and Technologies

The most popular APM solutions, working at the engine level, in the PHP space are the following:

The above-mentioned solutions have various degrees of complexity in terms of installation and use, with ZendHQ being the easiest of the lot, while Prometheus is the most complex to be fully actionable.  

There are more tools for PHP execution monitoring out there, with PHP sometimes being one of the supported technologies within a plethora of others.

See ZendHQ in Action

ZendHQ makes PHP monitoring, debugging, and orchestration a breeze. See details, or schedule a personalized demo for your team today via the links below.

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Picking the Right PHP Monitoring Tool for Your Needs