Procedure: Laravel Applications / Add Elastic Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

Objective

  • To provide instruction on adding Application Performance Monitoring (APM) to a Laravel application
  • APM can be easily integrated with Laravel applications using the Elastic APM for Laravel package

User

  • Solution Delivery Developers

Procedure

First steps

Add to your local .env first

ELASTIC_APM_ENABLED=false

 

Composer dependency requirements

  • Guzzle Adapter:
    • Recommend to use: composer require php-http/guzzle7-adapter
  • This will prevent some post install Composer errors: composer require arkaitzgarro/elastic-apm-laravel

 

Update AppServiceProvider

Use the below code as an example to add to the register() method in the AppServiceProvider to disable certificate validation (we use a self-signed certificate for now): 

use AG\ElasticApmLaravel\AgentBuilder;
…

public function register () {
    ...
        $this->app->bind(AgentBuilder::class, function () {
            $builder = new AgentBuilder();
            $builder->withHttpClient(new \Http\Adapter\Guzzle7\Client(new \GuzzleHttp\Client(['verify' => false])));
            return $builder;
        });

 

Add to .env.testing

ELASTIC_APM_ENABLED=false

 

Optional steps

Local testing .env file:

ELASTIC_APM_ENABLED=true
ELASTIC_APM_SERVER_URL=https://logstash-test.mcs.miamioh.edu:5523
ELASTIC_APM_SECRET_TOKEN=(to be shared later)
ELASTIC_APM_SERVICE_NAME="Your APPNAME"
APM_USEROUTEURI=true
APM_IGNORE_PATTERNS="/_debugbar/"

 

Add distributed tracing

You need to add the tracing ID to the HTTP header, when making the request to a WebService.  If you have access to the HTTP Client then it can be as simple as something like this.

$runner->withPreRequestHook(function (RequestInterface $request) {
                return ApmAgent::addTraceParentHeader($request);
            });

 

Add additional spans

use AG\ElasticApmLaravel\Facades\ApmCollector;

ApmCollector::startMeasure('my-custom-span', 'custom', 'measure', 'My custom span');

// do something amazing

ApmCollector::stopMeasure('my-custom-span');

 

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