Monitoring PHP-APC with collectd

Follow this guide to fetch PHP-APC performance metrics with collectd for monitoring, graphing and alerting purposes.

We utilize the curl_json collectd plugin to perform data collection from PHP-APC, so ensure that your collectd installation has this plugin available:

yum install collectd-wormly-curl-json
apt-get install collectd-wormly-curl-json

Then, ensure that apc_metrics.php is accessible to localhost; e.g. via this URL: http://127.0.0.1/apc_metrics.php. You can adjust the <url> configuration setting in monitor-php-apc.conf accordingly if apc_metrics.php is served via a different URL.

Now, place monitor-php-apc.conf in your collectd additional config directory; for example /opt/wormly/collectd/etc/collectd.d/.

Test your configuration:

# Check that the APC query script returns JSON and no errors:
curl http://127.0.0.1/apc_metrics.php

# Then verify collectd config:
collectd-wormly -T

No errors and {"ok":true} shown on the console? Reload the daemon to commence data collection:

service collectd-wormly restart

Multiple Instances of PHP-APC

You may have multiple instances of PHP-APC running on a single host (e.g. if you have multiple PHP-FPM pools). Accordingly, you will wish to identify metrics for each instance separately. To achieve this, simply duplicate the <url> block and change the URL and Instance values to suit your configuration:

<url "http://127.0.0.1/apc_metrics.php">
    Instance "apc"

Change the “1” to a unique ID for each instance. This can be alphanumeric if you wish, e.g.

<url "http://127.0.0.1:8080/apc_metrics.php">
    Instance "apcwebserver-pool"