Blackfire, the opinionated do-it-for-me observability solution

Observability isn’t just about collecting data; it’s about turning that data into a superpower for web application development. Developers can control, improve, and enforce better user experience by deeply understanding how applications perform.

However effective observability requires more than data; it demands high-quality information that integrates seamlessly with development workflows, transforming raw data into actionable insights. A crucial measure of an observability strategy’s success is how much useful information it provides relative to the data processing costs and the time invested to derive insights from that information.

Maximizing developer time

Developers should spend their time creating new features, not wading through data. Their time on observability should be as fruitful as possible. Blackfire is siding with its users and committing to ever-improving their developer experience.

The data collected by its deterministic profiler is processed and transformed into timelines and call graphs for all the available dimensions. SQL Queries, HTTP requests, and cache usages are gathered in a dedicated view to fasten specific analysis. Recommendations, which are actionable insights, are prompted to empower users, while all the matching assertions are automatically evaluated and prompted with visual feedback, simplifying the analysis.

Automated testing and performance monitoring

Once tests are in place, they can be automated to secure the most critical user journeys, and even plugged into your CI/CD to ensure a version of your application degrading its performance won’t be merged or deployed to production.

Blackfire Monitoring provides a low-overhead monitoring of your applications. The collected data is transformed into an actionable dashboard having you able to start your performance investigation and understand where and when something happened. Blackfire Monitoring also provides services monitoring and comes with an alerting layer to notify developers of issues before they affect users.

Understanding long-term trends

The Health Report is a convenient visualization of your application’s usage and performance trends over time. The already collected data are crushed even more and aggregated to empower users to understand their application’s dynamics.

Finally, Blackfire’s Continuous Profilers provide a holistic combination of profiler and monitoring to help you understand what’s happening to your application with the least overhead possible.

Blackfire stands out by not only simplifying the observability process but by enhancing it. By choosing an opinionated platform like Blackfire, you are not just collecting data; you are gaining a partner that delivers curated insights to help you regain and maintain control over your application’s performance. Blackfire is the co-pilot of your performance journey and puts you in the driver’s seat with the tools you swiftly improve and control the performance of your applications.

To better observability and beyond!