We have just rolled out an improvement to the Time Explorer, the low precision (15 minutes) chart that is rendered in the Dashboard and Application view with performance data for the complete retention period of your plan. It is now shown directly below the the head navigation now and stays there when navigating through to snapshots or transaction details screen. Additionally it now includes the service and environment switchers that have been part of the main application graph before.

We have just pushed the beta of a new version 5.0 of our XHProf fork to Github. It is rewritten from scatch with a modern code-base that makes use of PHP 7 internals and includes major datastructure improvements.

The realpath cache in PHP is often overlooked and its exact workings are a bit of a mystery to many developers, fueled by a lot of explanations on the web that are just plain wrong. How exactly is the realpath cache working and at which level of PHP? There has been some buzz around realpath cache in the last weeks, so it is a hot topic to look into.

We think monitoring and tracing should be performed across the whole application lifecycle and that it should be easy to compare changes between production, staging/QA and production environments. But for technical reasons we had to remove explicit support for multi-environment monitoring and tracing almost 2 years ago, when our backend and worker jobs couldn't handle the data from our original prototype data model.

We have improved the dashboard in Tideways to include preview charts with the last 24 hours of performance data and the performance of the most recent 15 minute interval. This provides you with a much better overview of all your applications and by selecting any time range in the preview chart you can directly jump to a time-range that interests you.