PHP Tracer releases

Instana monitors your PHP environment by using the PHP sensor and tracer. The PHP sensor provides infrastructure metrics, while the PHP Tracer provides automated code instrumentation and tracing data across your environment. For more information, see Monitoring PHP. To get specific tracer updates, you need to install the associated agent version specified in the release version.

For more information about the latest updates on PHP sensor, PHP-FPM sensor and PHP profile sensor, see PHP sensor releases.

The following releases offer the latest performance updates for PHP Tracer:

4.9.0

PHP Tracer 4.9.0 is released on 19 May 2025.

Features

PHP Tracer now supports Windows environments.

Improvements

This release improves the integration of PHP-CGI SAPI with PHP Tracer.

4.8.0

PHP Tracer 4.8.0 is released on 5 May 2025.

Features

PHP Tracer now provides the following features:

  • Removes support for PHP 7.0 and 8.0.
  • Introduces bitmask value to disable openLDAP instrumentation by using the disabled_instrumentation setting in the PHP INI file.

Improvements

The log level for PHP Tracer now defaults to NONE.

4.7.3

PHP Tracer 4.7.3 is released on 9 April 2025.

Fixes

This release fixes the OpenLDAP callback integrations to remove deprecated PHP Zend function convert_to_long_base ().

4.7.1

PHP Tracer 4.7.1 is released on 31 March 2025.

Fixes

This release fixes excessive INFO level logging to DEBUG level in PHP Tracer.

4.7.0

PHP Tracer 4.7.0 is released on 26 February 2025.

Features

PHP Tracer now provides the following features:

  • Supports the following environment variables:
    • INSTANA_AGENT_HOST
    • INSTANA_AGENT_PORT
    • INSTANA_EXTRA_HTTP_HEADERS
    • INSTANA_SECRETS
  • Captures request and response custom HTTP headers in exit span.

Fixes

This release fixes compatibility issues of MongoDB 1.20.0 and earlier with PHP 7.4 and later.

4.6.2

PHP Tracer 4.6.2 is released on 12 December 2024.

Features

The PHP Tracer now supports PHP 8.4. This release also updates support for environment variable INSTANA_DEBUG and INSTANA_LOG_LEVEL to enable logging in PHP Tracer.

4.6.1

PHP Tracer 4.6.1 is released on 20 November 2024.

Features

The PHP Tracer now supports PHP 8.4 RC4. This release also updates support for MongoDB. For more information, see Supported PHP extensions.

4.5.1

PHP Tracer 4.5.1 is released on 28 October 2024.

Features

PHP Tracer now supports forking through the pcntl_fork() built-in extension. For more information, see Supported PHP built-in extensions.

Fixes

Previously the PHP Tracer failed when it was used with the Drupal logger without specifying the third argument context for logging. This issue is fixed now.

4.2.0

PHP Tracer 4.2.0 is released on 9 October 2024.

Features

You can now use the INSTANA_AUTO_PROFILE environment variable to enable or disable auto-profiling.

Fixes

The PHP Tracer uses PHP runtime _SERVER array to fetch environment variables instead of the std::getenv() function.

4.1.0

PHP Tracer 4.1.0 is released on 21 August 2024.

To get the following features or performance updates, you need to have Agent 1.1.712 or later.

Features

PHP Tracer now captures the query statement from Couchbase queries that are made through the Couchbase PECL extension.

Fixes

Previously, PHP Tracer crashed when Instana traced Elastica (ruflin/elastica) and Elasticsearch (elasticsearch/elasticsearch) while elastic/transport 8.10.0 or later was used as a transitive dependency. This issue is now fixed.