Generate customized instructions using the guided setup

To generate all the basic installation commands for your environment and application, use the PHP guided setup. To access the PHP guided setup, follow these steps:

1. Log in to Splunk Observability Cloud.

2. Open the PHP guided setup. Optionally, you can navigate to the guided setup on your own:

   1. In the navigation menu, select Data Management.

   2. Go to the Available integrations tab, or select Add Integration in the Deployed integrations tab.

   3. In the integration filter menu, select By Product.

   4. Select the APM product.

   5. Select the PHP tile to open the PHP guided setup.

Install the SignalFx Tracing Library for PHP manually

If you don’t use the guided setup, follow these instructions to manually install the SignalFx Tracing Library for PHP:

1. Instrument your PHP application.

2. Deploy the PHP instrumentation in your environment.

3. Configure the PHP instrumentation for Splunk Observability Cloud.

Instrument your PHP application

Follow these steps to automatically instrument your application:

1. Check that you meet the requirements. See PHP instrumentation compatibility and requirements (deprecated).

2. Download the installation script from the following location:

   curl -LO  https://github.com/signalfx/signalfx-php-tracing/releases/latest/download/signalfx-setup.php

3. Install by running the installation script:

   php signalfx-setup.php --php-bin=all

   Note: If you omit the --php-bin option, you can interactively select the PHP installation.

4. Set the following environment variables:

   Apache configuration

   # Add the following lines to your Apache configuration file
   
   SetEnv SIGNALFX_SERVICE_NAME="<my-service-name>"
   SetEnv SIGNALFX_ENDPOINT_URL='http://localhost:9411/api/v2/spans'
   SetEnv SIGNALFX_TRACE_GLOBAL_TAGS="deployment.environment:<my_environment>"

   Terminal

   export SIGNALFX_SERVICE_NAME="<my-service-name>"
   export SIGNALFX_ENDPOINT_URL='http://localhost:9080/v1/trace'
   export SIGNALFX_TRACE_GLOBAL_TAGS="deployment.environment:<my_environment>"

   Set environment variables globally or using the start script of your PHP application.

5. Restart your server.

Next, deploy the PHP instrumentation in your environment. See Deploy the PHP instrumentation in your environment for more information.

INI file settings

If you don’t set any environment variable, the library extracts default values from the INI file. The prefix for settings defined using environment variables that start with SIGNALFX_TRACE_ is signalfx.trace.. For all other environment variables that start with SIGNALFX_ the prefix is signalfx..

You can use the signalfx-setup.php script to set INI file options without having to manually locate each file. For example:

php signalfx-setup.php --update-config --signalfx.endpoint_url=http://172.17.0.1:9080/v1/trace

This is useful for options common to all PHP services running in the system, like endpoints.

Deploy the PHP instrumentation in your environment

You can deploy the PHP instrumentation in Docker or, Kubernetes, or you can send data directly to Splunk Observability Cloud. See the following sections for instructions for your environment:

• Deploy the PHP instrumentation in Docker

• Deploy the PHP instrumentation in Kubernetes

• Send data directly to Splunk Observability Cloud

Deploy the PHP instrumentation in Docker

You can deploy the PHP instrumentation using Docker. Follow these steps to get started:

1. Create a startup shell script in a location Docker can access. The script can have any name, for example setup.sh.

2. Edit the startup shell script to export the environment variables described in Instrument your PHP application.

3. Add the following commands to the startup shell script to initialize the PHP instrumentation:

   curl -LO https://github.com/signalfx/signalfx-php-tracing/releases/latest/download/signalfx-setup.php
   php signalfx-setup.php --php-bin=all
   php signalfx-setup.php --update-config --signalfx.endpoint_url=https://ingest.<realm>.signalfx.com/v2/trace/signalfxv1
   php signalfx-setup.php --update-config --signalfx.access_token=<access_token>
   php signalfx-setup.php --update-config --signalfx.service_name=<service-name>

4. Add a line to the script to start the application using the supervisorctl, supervisord, systemd, or a similar command. The following example uses supervisorctl:

   supervisor start my-php-app

5. Add a command to run the newly created shell script at the end of the Dockerfile.

6. Rebuild the container using the docker build command.

Next, configure the PHP instrumentation for Splunk Observability Cloud. See Configure the PHP instrumentation for Splunk Observability Cloud.

Deploy the PHP instrumentation in Kubernetes

To deploy the PHP instrumentation in Kubernetes, configure the Kubernetes Downward API to expose environment variables to Kubernetes resources.

The following example shows how to update a deployment to expose environment variables by adding the agent configuration under the .spec.template.spec.containers.env section:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: my-deployment
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: your-application
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: your-application
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: myapp
        image: <image-name>
        env:
          - name: HOST_IP
            valueFrom:
              fieldRef:
                fieldPath: status.hostIP
          - name: SIGNALFX_SERVICE_NAME
            value: "<service-name>"
          - name: SIGNALFX_ENDPOINT_URL
            value: "http://$(HOST_IP):9411/api/v2/spans"
          - name: SIGNALFX_TRACE_GLOBAL_TAGS
            value: "deployment.environment:<my_environment>"

Next, configure the PHP instrumentation for Splunk Observability Cloud. See Configure the PHP instrumentation for Splunk Observability Cloud.

Send data directly to Splunk Observability Cloud

By default, all telemetry is sent to the local instance of the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector.

To bypass the OTel Collector and send data directly to Splunk Observability Cloud, set the following environment variables:

Apache configuration

SetEnv SIGNALFX_ACCESS_TOKEN=<access_token>
SetEnv SIGNALFX_ENDPOINT_URL=https://ingest.<realm>.signalfx.com/v2/trace/signalfxv1

Terminal

export SIGNALFX_ACCESS_TOKEN=<access_token>
export SIGNALFX_ENDPOINT_URL=https://ingest.<realm>.signalfx.com/v2/trace/signalfxv1