Laravel New Relic is a fantastic package that makes it simple to set up and monitor your Laravel application with New Relic APM. New Relic provides some excellent low-level insights into your application. The New Relic PHP agent is particularly useful in production environments, as it hooks in at a lower level than other monitoring services, with little to no impact on performance.

Installation

To monitor your application in production you’ll need a New Relic API account, and you should install the PHP monitoring agent. You don’t need to install New Relic in your development environment (unless you really want to). If the extension isn’t detected the package will simulate calls to the New Relic PHP agent, and log each one so you can test it before deploying.

To install the package, add it to your Laravel project with Composer:

composer require jackwh/laravel-new-relic

Then publish the config file:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="JackWH\LaravelNewRelic\LaravelNewRelicServiceProvider"

That’s it, you’re done! The package is ready to go, and configured out-of-the-box.

How It Works

The Service Provider

Laravel will auto-discover the LaravelNewRelicServiceProvider class, which binds NewRelicTransactionHandler and NewRelicTransaction classes as scoped singletons to the service container.

New Relic’s transaction API only allows a single transaction to be active simultaneously. That’s why the classes are loaded as singletons. Generally speaking, don’t try to start a new transaction mid-way through the request lifecycle.

Loggable Environments

The package checks if New Relic is installed. If it’s not found, you can log simulated transactions. In a loggable environment, the package will simulate calls it would normally make to New Relic’s methods (e.g. newrelic_start_transaction()). These are loaded from the LoggableNewRelicFunctions.php helper file. You can check your logs to see what’s happening under the hood.

Don’t worry if your logs don’t show a “transaction ended” item, as New Relic automatically finishes them at the end of a request. This is only really important for long-running processes, like the queue handler. Once you’re happy logging is working as expected, you can comment out local in the config/new-relic.php file. This is just intended to help you check the package is working before initial deployment, or when making changes that would affect New Relic transactions.

Live Environments

Assuming the New Relic extension is loaded, the package sets up hooks into Laravel to monitor requests at different stages of the lifecycle:

• HTTP transactions are handled with a global NewRelicMiddleware on each request
• CLI requests are filtered out for noise (so long-running calls like php artisan horizon won’t skew your stats).
• Queued jobs record a transaction automatically as each one starts and ends.
• Artisan commands are recorded as individual transactions.
• Scheduled tasks are monitored as each one is executed.

The package also registers a php artisan new-relic:deploy command, to notify New Relic of changes as part of your deployment process.

This package has a lot more, For more details, you can visit its complete documentation and source code on Github.

Note

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