Monitor Your PHP Applications with AppSignal

Good news for PHP developers: AppSignal monitoring is now available for PHP applications.

Our new package brings traces, metrics, and logs from your PHP app into AppSignal, with auto-instrumentation for frameworks like Laravel and Symfony and a foundation built on OpenTelemetry.

Already using AppSignal's PHP package and want the latest updates? Migrating is straightforward: remove your current OpenTelemetry setup and follow our new install guide.

Let's take a tour of the core features and see how AppSignal can give your PHP application the visibility it deserves.

With AppSignal for PHP you get

Let's take a closer look at each.

Built for the PHP frameworks you already use

The AppSignal for PHP package works with any PHP application, and it ships with auto-instrumentation for:

• Laravel
• Symfony
• Monolog for logging

Since everything sits on top of OpenTelemetry, you're not limited to that list. Pull in any OpenTelemetry-based auto-instrumentation package and extend coverage to the libraries your application depends on.

Using a PHP package you'd like us to cover? Let us know, and we'll dig into it together.

Error monitoring

When something breaks, AppSignal tells you what went wrong, where it happened, and why.

Track errors per deployment to see exactly which release introduced a problem, and use tools like Time Detective to retrace your application's steps leading up to an incident. Instead of guessing, you can follow the trail and get straight to a fix.

Caught and handled an exception yourself? Record it with the Appsignal::setError helper, so the errors you recover from in code still show up in AppSignal and nothing goes unnoticed.

Alerting

You control how and when AppSignal reaches you about errors. Send alerts to Slack, Discord, PagerDuty, or Opsgenie, and open tickets in GitHub, GitLab, or Jira, so the right people hear about the right problems without digging through a dashboard.

Use the Logbook to keep the full story around an incident in one place.

Performance monitoring

AppSignal keeps an eye on how your application performs and flags slowdowns before they turn into bigger problems. Find your bottlenecks, clear them out, and scale with confidence.

Each slow request is broken down so you can see exactly where the time goes, from database queries to external calls. With that in front of you, it's clear what to fix first. Need to go deeper? Wrap your own code in spans with custom instrumentation.

Anomaly detection

With anomaly detection, you set what "healthy" looks like for your application and let AppSignal watch the boundaries for you. The moment a metric crosses a limit, you'll know where and when it happened.

Create a trigger for any metric you want to keep an eye on. AppSignal can notify you when response times go above your limit, when errors spike after a deploy, or when memory usage keeps climbing.

The result is the confidence to get ahead of issues, rather than scrambling to put out fires after they start.

Process monitoring

Errors and slow requests aren't the only things that can go wrong. Scheduled jobs, queue workers, and cron tasks can silently stop running, and nobody finds out until something downstream breaks.

Process Monitoring lets you confirm your background processes are actually doing what they're supposed to. Define a check-in for any scheduled task or worker, and AppSignal tells you the moment it goes quiet.

Host monitoring

Beyond your code, AppSignal keeps tabs on the hosts running your PHP application, with CPU, disk, network, and memory metrics all in one view. It's the full picture of how your application behaves in production, not just what's happening in the codebase.

PHP dashboards

Dashboards turn your application's metrics into visuals you can read at a glance, so you can follow performance trends without digging through raw data.

Spot something on a graph that deserves a closer look? Select that point to jump straight to your application's state at that exact moment. You can also add custom markers to give you and your team more context around how your application behaves over time.

More than just metrics, bring your logs along

AppSignal stores your logs side by side with your traces and metrics. If your application uses Monolog, the go-to logging library for PHP, add the AppSignal handler to your handler stack and your logs start flowing in minutes. Pairing your logs with your APM data gives you a much richer view of how your code is really running.

From an error in your application to the exact log line behind it is only a few clicks, and you can query, filter, and easily share logs.

Up and running in minutes

Setup is quick: install the package, run the install command, and your PHP application starts sending data to AppSignal.

Add the package with Composer:

composer require appsignal/appsignal-php

Then run the install command to generate your configuration, wire up framework auto-instrumentation, and send some example data to AppSignal:

vendor/bin/appsignal install --push-api-key=<push-api-key> --collector-endpoint=<collector-endpoint> --app-name=<app-name> --app-environment=<your-environment>

Our PHP documentation covers every step, including how to set up the OpenTelemetry PHP extension.

We want your feedback!

Our PHP package is still young, and we haven't had the chance to try it against every setup out there yet, so a few features might not play nicely with your application's data right away. If you hit a snag or have an idea for how we can do better, contact support or join us on our Discord server. We'd love to hear from you.

AppSignal: your PHP APM tool

AppSignal is made by developers for developers, giving you the insight you need to run and grow your PHP application with confidence. With AppSignal, you get:

• A 360-degree view of your application data.
• An interface that's easy to use.
• Errors, logs, and performance incidents tied neatly together.
• One home for monitoring your PHP, Node.js, front-end JavaScript, Ruby, Elixir, and Python applications.

Already monitoring your PHP app with another tool? See how AppSignal compares to other monitoring tools.

Just started a trial? Once your PHP application is reporting to AppSignal, drop us a line and we'll send a box of stroopwafels your way 🍪!