Elastic APM Symfony Bundle

This bundle integrates the Elastic APM PHP API into Symfony. For more information about Elastic APM, please visit https://www.elastic.co/apm. This bundle adds a lot more essentials. Here's a quick list:

1. Better transaction naming strategy: Your transaction traces can be named accurately by route names, the controller name, the request URI or you can decide on a custom naming strategy via a seamless interface that uses any naming convention you deem fit. While running console commands, it also sets the transaction name as the command name.

2. Console Commands Enhancements: While running console commands, its sets the options and arguments passed via the CLI as custom parameters to the transaction trace for easier debugging.

3. Exception Listening: It also captures all Symfony exceptions in web requests and console commands and sends them to Elastic APM.

4. Interactor Service: It provides access to most of the Elastic APM API via a Service class ElasticApmInteractorInterface::class. This can be injected it into any class, controller, service to communicate with APM. If the adaptive interactive is used then any APM calls will be ignored when the extension isn't loaded (for example in development environments).

   $this->apm->addLabel('name', 'john');

5. Logging Support: In development, you are unlikely to have Elastic APM setup. There's a configuration to enable logging which outputs all actions to your Symfony log, hence emulating what it would actually do in production.

Installation

Step 0 : Install Elastic APM

Follow https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/agent/php/current/intro.html.

Step 1: Add dependency

$ composer require myschoolmanagement/elastic-apm-symfony-bundle

Step 2: Register the bundle

Then register the bundle with your kernel:

<?php

// in AppKernel::registerBundles()
$bundles = array(
    // ...
    new ElasticApmBundle\ElasticApmBundle(),
    // ...
);

Step 3: Configuring Elastic APM

You should review all the configuration items for the agent extension here, https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/agent/php/current/configuration.html. These must be set either through environment variables or php.ini. These cannot be set during the request and so the bundle does not support setting them.

Step 4: Configure the bundle

The following are all the options you can configure on the bundle.

# app/config/config.yml

elastic_apm:
    enabled: true                         # Defaults to true
    logging: false                        # If true, logs all interactions to the Symfony log (default: false)
    interactor: ~                         # The interactor service that is used. Setting enabled=false will override this value 
    deprecations: true                    # If true, reports deprecations to Elastic APM (default: true)
    track_memory_usage: false             # If true, records peak memory usage
    memory_usage_label: memory_usage      # The name of the custom label to write memory usage to
    exceptions:
       enabled: true                      # If true, sends exceptions (default: true)
       should_unwrap_exceptions: false    # If true, will also sends the previous/nested exception (default: false)
       ignored_exceptions:                # List of exception classes to ignore
          - An\Ignored\Exception
    http:
        enabled: true
        transaction_naming: route         # route, controller or service (see below)
        transaction_naming_service: ~     # Transaction naming service (see below)
    commands: 
        enabled: true                     # If true, enhances CLI commands with options and arguments (default: true)
        explicitly_collect_exceptions: true # Turn this off if you are experiencing multiple reports of exceptions.

Enhanced RUM instrumentation

This bundle does not integrate RUM (see https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/server/current/overview.html) as there are a multiple of ways to install and configure the instrumentation.

Transaction naming strategies

The bundle comes with three built-in transaction naming strategies:

• route
• controller
• uri

Naming the transaction after the route, controller or request URI respectively. However, the bundle supports custom transaction naming strategies through the service configuration option. If you have selected the service configuration option, you must pass the name of your own transaction naming service as the transaction_naming_service configuration option.

The transaction naming service class must implement the ElasticApmBundle\TransactionNamingStrategy\TransactionNamingStrategyInterface interface. For more information on creating your own services, see the Symfony documentation on Creating/Configuring Services in the Container.

Interactor services

The config keyelastic_apm.interactor will accept a service ID to a service implementing ElasticApmInteractorInterface. This bundle comes with a few services that may be suitable for you.

Configuration value	Description
ElasticApmBundle\Interactor\AdaptiveInteractor	This is the default interactor. It will check once per request if the agent extension is installed or not.
ElasticApmBundle\Interactor\ElasticApmInteractor	This interactor communicates with the Elastic APM agent. It is the one decorator that actually does some work.
ElasticApmBundle\Interactor\BlackholeInteractor	This interactor silently drops any calls.
auto	This value will check if the Elastic APM PHP extension is installed when you build your container.

Note that if you set elastic_apm.enabled: false you will always use the BlackholeInteractor no matter what value used for elastic_apm.interactor.

Monolog

The Elastic APM PHP extension does not directly support sending of log entries as anything other than errors. We recommend adding a new log handler and configuring the elasticsearch (or Elastica) client in your application configuration.

Example:

# app/config/config.yml

monolog:
  handlers:
     errors_to_elasticsearch:
        type: buffer
        level: error
        handler: elasticsearch
     elasticsearch:
        type: service
        id: 'Monolog\Handler\ElasticsearchHandler'

Troubleshooting

Exceptions from commands are being recorded multiple times

PHP APM will automatically collect unhandled exceptions. The bundle will also install a listener for command exceptions. Our listener and the default behaviour can conflict which causes this behaviour.

To fix this you can turn off explicitly_collect_exceptions under the command configuration node.

Credits

This bundle is based largely on the work done by https://github.com/ekino/EkinoNewRelicBundle.