Documentation Grafana Cloud Monitor applications Application Observability Instrument your application PHP

Instrument a PHP application

Follow this article to install the upstream OpenTelemetry distribution for PHP and auto-instrument your application running on Linux for Grafana Cloud Application Observability.

Alternatively, if you need a instrumentation solution for PHP supported by Grafana, use Grafana Beyla.

Before you begin

The is the first step to get telemetry data into Application Observability, you need:

1. A PHP development environment 8.0+.
2. PECL.
3. Composer.

Install the SDK

Install the latest release of the OpenTelemetry PHP extension:

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pecl install opentelemetry

Install the protobuf extension for improved OTLP exporter performance:

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pecl install protobuf

Add the extensions to php.ini:

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extension=protobuf.so

[opentelemetry]
extension=opentelemetry.so

Install required packages via composer, including auto-instrumentation for the Slim framework:

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composer require \
  open-telemetry/sdk \
  open-telemetry/exporter-otlp \
  open-telemetry/opentelemetry-auto-slim \
  php-http/guzzle7-adapter

If Composer autoloading is not already enabled, modify the application entrypoint to include this line:

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require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

Collect logs

To collect logs for your PHP application:

1. Use a PSR-3 compatible logger such as monolog.
2. Add auto-instrumentation for PSR-3 Loggers to automatically collect logs.

To add auto-instrumentation for psr3-loggers add the following composer dependency:

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composer require open-telemetry/opentelemetry-auto-psr3

Now when you use your logger, OpenTelemetry automatically collects the logs:

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/** @var \Psr\Log\LoggerInterface $logger */
$logger->info('This message will be sent to Grafana Cloud via OTLP');

Instrument your application

Export the following environment variables before running your application to configure auto-instrumentation:

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export OTEL_PHP_AUTOLOAD_ENABLED=true
export OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER=otlp
export OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER=otlp
export OTEL_LOGS_EXPORTER=otlp
export OTEL_PROPAGATORS=baggage,tracecontext

Test your instrumentation

To test if you successfully instrumented your application and are producing telemetry data, run the application. The console output should print references to metrics and logs.

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php -S localhost:8080

Example application

See the Rolldice service for a complete example setup.

Next steps

1. Create a free Grafana Cloud account
2. Configure your telemetry data destination:
   1. Grafana Cloud OTLP endpoint: for a quick local development and testing setup
   2. OpenTelemetry Collector: for a robust and scalable production setup
3. Observe your services in Application Observability

Resources

1. PHP OpenTelemetry documentation
2. opentelemetry package on PECL
3. opentelemetry-php-instrumentation on GitHub