PHP Performance Monitoring with Atatus PHP APM

Pavithra Parthiban -

PHP is used by millions of websites and applications around the world because it’s easy to work with and very flexible. But like any technology, PHP apps can run into problems like slow performance or errors that affect users and your business.

Atatus PHP APM provides developers, DevOps engineers, and SREs with clear insights into what is happening inside PHP applications, helping them find and fix issues faster, improve performance, and keep things running smoothly.

In this blog, we will take a closer look at Atatus PHP APM, what it does, why it’s important, and how your team can start using it right away.

Table of Contents:

  1. Why Monitoring PHP Application Performance is Critical?
  2. What is Atatus PHP APM?
  3. Core Features of Atatus PHP APM
  4. Why should your team use Atatus PHP APM?
  5. How to Get Started with Atatus PHP APM?
  6. FAQs on PHP Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

Why Monitoring PHP Application Performance is Critical?

As your PHP app grows in users and complexity, small issues can turn into big problems:

  • Slow response times frustrate users and increase bounce rates.
  • Uncaught errors cause crashes or inconsistent behaviour.
  • Inefficient database queries delay data retrieval.
  • Complex microservices introduce hidden latency.
  • Frontend delays and errors spoil the user experience.

Without proper monitoring, detecting and troubleshooting issues can take much longer than necessary. PHP Monitoring tools help you see inside your application, how it behaves under real user conditions and where bottlenecks lie. This allows you to solve problems before customers notice them.

PHP performance challenges aren’t the same for every business, an e-commerce store, a SaaS platform, and a media streaming service all face different bottlenecks.

Read our detailed guide on how different industries leverage PHP monitoring

What is Atatus PHP APM?

Atatus PHP APM is a comprehensive performance monitoring and error tracking solution specifically designed for PHP applications. It tracks your app’s health and behaviour in real-time, giving you detailed insights into how your code performs, where errors happen, and how users experience your site.

Atatus is built to serve the needs of:

  • Developers, who want to pinpoint slow or failing code quickly.
  • DevOps engineers, who need to maintain application stability and uptime.
  • SREs, who ensure reliability by proactively managing performance.

Atatus PHP APM provides a complete view from backend code execution to frontend user experience, all in one unified dashboard.

Want to get the most out of your PHP monitoring? Read our guide on Best Practices for PHP Application Monitoring.

Core Features of Atatus PHP APM

Atatus: Comprehensive PHP Application Monitoring

1. Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

Atatus continuously monitors your PHP application's performance by tracking essential metrics like response times, throughput, memory usage, and error rates. This real-time visibility helps you quickly pinpoint slow endpoints or inefficient functions that impact your app’s speed and reliability.

Key benefits include:

  1. Detailed transaction traces for every request showing time spent in each function
  2. Tracking request volume to understand traffic trends and load patterns
  3. Monitoring memory consumption to detect leaks or spikes that degrade performance
  4. Identifying and alerting on elevated error rates to prevent user impact

Example: If your checkout API suddenly slows from 300ms to 3 seconds, Atatus immediately highlights this, enabling your team to investigate and fix it before it affects sales.

2. Error Tracking

When PHP errors or exceptions occur, Atatus automatically captures comprehensive error reports, including stack traces, environment data (such as PHP version and server info), and request details. This detailed information helps developers find the real problem quickly without going through confusing logs.

Additional features:

  1. Grouping similar errors together to reduce noise and focus on unique issues
  2. Historical error trend analysis for spotting recurring problems
  3. Custom error tagging and filtering for prioritizing fixes based on severity

This efficient error tracking speeds up debugging and improves code quality over time.

3. Database Monitoring

Slow database queries are a common cause of poor app performance. Atatus tracks query execution times and frequency to help you identify inefficient or problematic database interactions. With these insights, you can optimize your SQL, add indexes, or refactor code to reduce database load and latency.

Highlights include:

  1. Monitoring detailed query performance, including slow queries and their exact SQL text
  2. Correlating database calls with overall transaction times to find bottlenecks
  3. Support for popular databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB

Optimizing your database queries based on this data can significantly improve app responsiveness.

4. Distributed Tracing

Modern PHP applications often rely on multiple services and external APIs. Distributed tracing visualizes the entire journey of a user request as it passes through various components, showing where delays or failures occur.

This feature helps you:

  1. Identify exactly which service or API causes latency or errors
  2. View detailed timing and span data for each step in the transaction
  3. Perform faster root cause analysis by following the trace end-to-end
  4. Tag traces by user, endpoint, or error status for easy filtering

By understanding the full flow, you can optimise each part of your application ecosystem efficiently.

5. Real User Monitoring (RUM)

Backend metrics tell only part of the story, actual user experience depends heavily on frontend performance. Atatus RUM collects client-side data like page load times, JavaScript errors, and user interaction timings to give a complete picture.

This data helps your team:

  1. Detect frontend performance issues that affect users directly
  2. Monitor real-world user behaviour and engagement
  3. Fix frontend errors that might not be visible from backend logs

Improving frontend performance with RUM insights leads to higher user satisfaction and retention.

6. Alerting and Notifications

Proactive monitoring is critical to catch issues before users report them. Atatus allows you to set custom alerts based on key metrics like error rates, response times, or resource usage.

7. Log Correlation

While logs provide raw event data, they can be overwhelming alone. Atatus correlates logs with performance and error data, creating a unified timeline that shows what happened, when, and why during incidents.

This correlation helps:

  1. Speed up troubleshooting by linking errors with related logs and metrics
  2. Provide full context for incidents without switching between multiple tools
  3. Improve incident reports with comprehensive, correlated data

Having all relevant information in one place reduces downtime and improves developer productivity.

8. Framework Integration

Atatus offers seamless integration with popular PHP frameworks like Laravel, Symfony, and Slim. Thanks to auto-instrumentation, setup is quick and requires minimal configuration, letting you start monitoring within minutes.

Benefits include:

  1. Framework-specific tracing for deeper insights
  2. Support for both monolithic and microservice architectures
  3. Easy installation without code changes in most cases

This makes Atatus accessible for teams of all sizes and speeds up adoption.

9. Session Tracing

For applications that depend heavily on PHP sessions, Atatus tracks the lifecycle of sessions along with detailed function-level tracing inside them. This helps uncover slow session management issues or errors tied to user sessions.

Session tracing features:

  1. Monitoring session start, usage, and destruction events
  2. Identifying slow or failing session operations that impact user experience
  3. Correlating session data with transactions and errors for full visibility

By optimizing session handling, you can improve responsiveness and reliability for logged-in users.

Why should your team use Atatus PHP APM?

  1. Faster Root Cause Analysis: Instead of hunting blindly, your team gets actionable insights with clear error locations and slow code paths. This reduces mean time to resolution (MTTR).
  2. Improved User Experience: By identifying frontend and backend bottlenecks, your app performs better, resulting in faster load times, fewer errors, and happier users.
  3. Proactive Issue Detection: Custom alerts notify you of abnormal patterns early, enabling your team to fix problems before they impact users.
  4. Collaboration Between Teams: Developers, DevOps, and SREs see the same performance data, making teamwork easier.
  5. Scalability and Reliability: With visibility into complex distributed architectures, Atatus helps you scale confidently while maintaining reliability.

How to Get Started with Atatus PHP APM?

Getting started with Atatus is simple:

  • Sign up for an Atatus account and create a new PHP application project.
  • Install the Atatus PHP agent to start monitoring your application, see our PHP Agent Installation Overview for detailed steps across different operating systems.
  • Integrate with your PHP framework such as Laravel, Symfony, or Slim using built-in support. See the full list of PHP agent supported frameworks.
  • Start sending performance data, errors, and traces to your Atatus dashboard.
  • Set up custom alerts based on your app’s performance goals.
  • Use the dashboard to monitor real-time performance, analyse issues, and improve your app continuously.

Atatus offers detailed documentation and a 14-day free trial so you can explore all features.

Atatus Setup and Monitoring Process

FAQs on PHP Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

1. What is PHP Application Performance Monitoring(APM)?

PHP APM is the practice of monitoring and managing the performance of PHP applications. It involves gathering detailed metrics on key aspects such as response times, database queries, external calls, and resource utilization to detect and address performance bottlenecks.

2. Why is PHP APM important?

PHP APM is crucial for ensuring the smooth and efficient operation of PHP applications. It helps in:

  • Quickly detect and fix performance issues
  • Optimize resource usage and lower infrastructure costs.
  • Enhance user experience by keeping applications fast and responsive.
  • Gain valuable insights into application behavior and areas for improvement.

3. How does PHP APM work?

Typically, a PHP APM tool works by deploying a lightweight agent on your web server alongside your PHP application. This agent gathers performance data in real-time and transmits it to a central APM server or service for analysis and visualization. The agent generally supports multiple PHP versions, operating systems, web servers, and widely used PHP frameworks.

4. What metrics does PHP APM collect?

PHP APM tools typically collect a wide range of metrics, including:

  • Response times: Overall transaction response times and individual component timings.
  • Database queries: Query execution times, slow queries, and query counts.
  • External calls: Performance of calls to external services or APIs.
  • Error rates: Tracking and reporting of application errors and exceptions.
  • Resource utilization: CPU, memory, and disk usage by the application.
  • Throughput: Number of requests processed per unit of time.

5. What are the benefits of using a PHP APM tool?

The benefits of using a PHP APM tool include:

  • Faster troubleshooting by quickly finding the root cause of performance issues.
  • Proactive problem detection to spot potential issues before they affect users.
  • Improved code quality through identifying and fixing inefficient code sections.
  • Better resource management by optimising infrastructure and reducing operational costs.
  • Enhanced user satisfaction by delivering a consistently fast and reliable application experience.

6. What are some common challenges in PHP Application Performance Monitoring?

Challenges can include:

  • Overhead: Ensuring the APM agent has minimal impact on application performance.
  • Configuration complexity: Setting up and configuring the agent and monitoring environment.
  • Data volume: Managing and analyzing large amounts of performance data.
  • Integration with existing tools: Ensuring compatibility with other monitoring or DevOps tools.

7. How do I choose the right PHP APM solution?

  • Consider compatibility with your PHP version, framework, and web server.
  • Assess the range of metrics collected, alerting options, and reporting features.
  • Choose a solution that offers easy setup and a user-friendly interface.
  • Ensure the solution can scale to accommodate your application's growth and traffic.
  • Compare pricing models and features offered by different vendors.