How does monitoring work?

In very simple terms, performance monitoring is measuring how long different parts of your project take to complete. By tracking these execution times, Flare can provide you with insight into performance issues and helps you pinpoint their causes.

What data we collect

Each time your project processes a request, command, or job, a trace is generated and sent to Flare. These traces capture a detailed record of every operation performed by your project.

A trace consists of spans, each representing an individual task within a request, job, or query. If your traffic is low, you may need to configure Flare to process more traces. This will generate more spans, which count toward your account's usage limits. Keep in mind that each plan has a maximum number of spans you can generate. You can configure the percentage of requests that are sent to Flare.

Read Working with traces to learn how to use traces to identify performance issues.

We focus on Laravel and PHP for performance monitoring, and organize all this data using concepts you already know. Routes, jobs, and commands are grouped together with database queries, external HTTP calls, and views.

You don’t need to be a data analyst to use Flare, but knowing some key metrics helps:

• Averages: Total time divided by number of requests. A useful baseline, but can be skewed by very low or high values.
• Median (p50): The time below which 50% of requests fall, representing a typical user’s experience.
• p95 (95th percentile): 95% of requests are faster than this time, making it useful for spotting performance bottlenecks.
• Throughput: Requests per minute, showing how often a request is executed.

Flare uses these metrics to give you a good idea of how your project is performing and to help you find performance issues.

Setting up your first project

New and existing projects should use the latest versions of our Flare package (for Laravel, PHP or JavaScript) to connect your project to Flare. This single package gives you access to error tracking and performance monitoring (only for Laravel and PHP).

Every new project in Flare starts from scratch, so it takes some time for the data to populate. Depending on the amount of traffic your project receives, it may take a few days to fill in the graphs and tables with useful performance data.