Distributed Tracing for PHP (Laravel Applications) with Zero-Code Changes

Grafana
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We are in the process of transitioning from New Relic Cloud to the Grafana ecosystem. However, we’ve encountered an issue with Beyla, which presently supports Distributed Traces exclusively for Golang, and only Single Span traces for other languages.

  • So Beyla does not yet support distributed tracing for Laravel (PHP applications) and most of our microservices are written in PHP so it is a blocker for us.
  • Also for Zero-code Instrumentation, we were checking Opentelemetry’s automatic instrumentation but it requires PHP 8.0 at minimum, and most of our PHP applications are on version 7 or lower. - PHP zero-code instrumentation | OpenTelemetry

So, we are looking for way to have auto instrumentation for our Laravel (PHP) applications with distributed tracing, preferably through Zero-code Instrumentation. Are there any ways to resolve this problem? Is this possible with Grafana?

Are there any current alternatives to Beyla that support zero-code auto-instrumentation with distributed traces?
This will be helpful for us in this quarter as we are transitioning away from New Relic due to cost concerns, at least until Beyla releases distributed tracing support for PHP.

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have you looked at otel auto instrumentation. it is pretty decent/

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This needs a minimum of PHP 8.0. @yosiasz Is there an alternative way to do this?

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What php are you on?

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@yosiasz We use PHP 7.3 across most of our services, and for one service, we have PHP 8. However, auto-instrumentation is not working in that service due to the Laravel Lumen framework, whereas the documentation provides example of compatibility with the Slim framework.

1 Like
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php 7.3

Release date
December 6, 2018

End-of-life (EOL)
December 6, 2021

just saying :wink: