Elastic APM agent and opentelemetry-php

[ArtemisMucaj]

Hi,

I have a question about the vision of the Elastic team about the Elastic APM PHP agent and the OpenTelemetry PHP agent (which hit a stable version not so long ago). What's the vision? Will development happen in both agents ? Do you recommend one or the other ?

The Elastic APM agent for PHP does not feel quite stable to me in production and feels outdated in what is instrumented compared the OpenTelemetry agent. If someone has experience using both it'd be interesting to know.

Thank you,

Artemis

[Emily_Stolfo]

Hi @ArtemisMucaj Thanks for your question. We are indeed shifting our efforts to focus on the OpenTelemetry PHP project. There are some instrumentation and feature differences between what the Elastic APM agent offers versus what the OTel PHP agent offers but we are working to close that gap, with less new feature work in the Elastic APM agent. Nevertheless, we are still committed to supporting our current users on the Elastic agent.
I would say for now, depending on your use case and feature needs, you could use either the Elastic or OTel agent. In the long-term, the OTel agent would probably be the recommended choice.
In the meantime, what about the Elastic APM agent doesn't feel stable to you in production? Is there something specific we can help with?
Thanks, Emily

[ArtemisMucaj]

Thank you for your answer, it's good to know. I think our efforts will also shift toward that!

With the Elastic APM PHP agent the issues I'm having in production are related to lack/loss of tracing.

We're using it on high traffic web services deployed with PHP-FPM and it seems works fine with low traffic services, the throughput reported looks legit.

However with high traffic services we get some data reported at deployment and then the throughput drops at 0. From time to time it starts reporting things again but the throughput does not represent our service's actual values (obtained from access logs).

I'm using version 1.10.0 with PHP 8.2 however I had the same issue with 1.6.9 and PHP 8.2.