As of April 2022, more than 75% of the internet comprises websites made using PHP (source). That is to say, three out of four websites on the internet have been developed using PHP! That is huge! With that many PHP web applications on the web, there need to be systems that can automatedly keep track of how they respond to the hundreds of thousands of clients connecting worldwide.

The cloud is growing more and more popular each day. We are in an era where there is a prominent trend of companies migrating from traditional on-premise systems to more reliable and fast cloud-based systems. However, the conversion is still not rampant on a large scale, primarily due to the lack of awareness in the up-and-coming businesses about the cloud’s fundamentals. However, the cloud has proven to be a sound and worthy option time and time again.

You’ve likely heard the term Observability lately. There’s a fundamental change taking place in the Monitoring space, and Observability is behind it. Observability itself is a broad topic, so in this post we’ll talk about what it means to move from Application Performance Monitoring to Application Performance Observability.

Before we dive into the Collector, let’s cover the components that make up the OpenTelemetry project. If you missed it, our post What is OpenTelemetry gives a high level introduction to OpenTelemetry and the key components of OpenTelemetry project: The OpenTelemetry collector is optional when using a SaaS service like Scout. Even so, knowing what the Collector can do and when to use it is helpful to understand.

Cloud and cloud-based technologies are at their peak today. More and more organizations are turning to intelligent architectures and systems to deploy their apps. And they are not wrong—the cloud has proven to be a great way of performance optimization and cost-cutting. However, there are issues to address with this growing trend. One of those is monitoring. Monitoring is a vital part of application maintenance.