Why Good PHP Monitoring Matters

PHP 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 a PHP application.

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, outline evaluation criteria for choosing the right PHP monitoring tools, and discuss how Zend can support your PHP APM efforts.

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

Why PHP Monitoring Is Necessary for Web Apps

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, 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/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 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.

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.

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.

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 

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

How to Evaluate PHP Monitoring Tools

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. It is important to emphasize some processes-related characteristics a PHP APM 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, 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 APM solution is your best monitoring solution.