Configuring Blackfire Monitoring Requires Monitoring Early Bird¶

Activating Monitoring on an Environment¶

Once you have subscribed to Blackfire Monitoring, you should activate it on the relevant environment:

• Configure your php.ini file with blackfire.apm_enabled = 1;
• Go to the Settings tab of your organization and click on “Monitoring” in the index;
• For each environment, you can Enable or Disable Monitoring

This requires to have admin rights on the environments, or to be the subscription owner.

You can disable Monitoring on an environment any time your need.

Additional settings are available, at the environment level.

Sample Rate¶

The Sample Rate represents the percentage of your PHP requests which you would like Blackfire to monitor.

Each request which is monitored generates a “Trace”.

As Blackfire Monitoring pricing is based on a quota of Traces, you can balance:

• changing your Trace Quota and control the subscription costs;
• changing your Sample Rate and control the monitoring granularity.

Note that this tracing level captures basic performance metrics, such as overall response time and memory usage, and generates close-to-no overhead.

Extended Sample Rate¶

The Extended Sample Rate represents the percentage of Traces for which Blackfire will collect more in-depth metrics.

Especially, such Extended Traces will include Spans.

A Span is the representation of a function call over time, just like in a profile timeline.

Collecting Spans may generate additional overhead on Extended Traces.

With the Extended Sample Rate, you can balance:

• the number of end-user requests which may be impacted by the overhead;
• the possibility for you to collect in-depth performance metrics with “real-world” context.

Span Time Threshold¶

The Span Time Threshold represents the minimum amount of time spent in a function call so that a Span will be collected for that call.

Spans are displayed on a Transaction view.

With the Span Time Threshold, you can balance:

• the quantity of Spans which will be collected;
• the overhead that will be added on the Extended Traces.