Tideways 2024.3 Release

We strive to improve clarity and user-friendliness, and have thus focused our efforts on several features that align with this objective. Our new Sidebar Menu, the Release Tracking Feature and an increased comparison range for Releases and Markers as well as the possibility to show error messages in notifications all fall into this category.

Summary:

PHP 8.4 support from the start

PHP 8.4 will be released at the end of November 2024 and Tideways – as always – supports  it from the start with the PHP Extension Release 5.14.0.

The last versions of the PHP extension also added new instrumentations: DNS functions, password hashing and sending e-mails are now visible in the Timeline Profiler.

Turn navigation into an intuitive experience: Our new Sidebar Menu

We are convinced that the new Sidebar Menu improves usability and discoverability and makes the overall navigation experience more intuitive. With an increasing amount of primary features in Tideways, the top navigation no longer provided enough room to accommodate them anymore. A sidebar navigation proved to be the most effective approach to meet this challenge and enhance its user-friendliness.

There are new shortcuts in the sidebar navigation:

  • If you click on the Tideways logo or the organization, a popup will open, allowing you to swiftly navigate between all your organizations and projects.
  • From the footer navigation, you can access user and organization settings.
  • Main features such as Tracepoints, Incidents or Slow SQL queries are now available directly from the sidebar navigation.

In the line of improving our menu, it is now possible to jump directly to the relevant performance details of a trace via the widget “Go”.

We decided to switch to the new Sidebar Menu completely and activate it for everyone by default. You will be able to go back to the old sidebar navigation from the “User Settings” until the end of the year 2024; thereafter, only the new Sidebar Menu will be available.

Compare Aggregated Traces directly from Incident and Release Tracking

What was previously feasible at the monitoring level has now become feasible also at the profiling level.

Now, it is possible to identify the leading cause behind a change in performance, rather than simply observing that a change happened. 

Subsequently, it has become more convenient to compare performance data from two distinct time periods.

You can instruct Tideways to compute an aggregate of traces from before and after the comparison time and Tideways will immediately show you the differential flame graph that allows spotting the degraded calls such as SQL queries.

There are three possibilities to start into this performance comparison 

  1. Set/Add markers. To display performance before and after a selected date, you can set/add a named marker. This is useful to reference important events in the project lifecycle and allows a swift comparison between the before and after. A significant event could be, for instance, the start of an email marketing campaign.
  1. Use the Release Tracking Feature: Since markers do not support automated notifications, the Release Tracking Feature should be used to compare performance prior to and subsequent to releases. You can see a list of recent releases on the left side of the release tracking screen: 

Below the details, which show a before-and-after comparison, transactions for this timeframe are listed:

3. Response Time Incident: When a response time incident is triggered the Tideways UI now shows the most degraded and improved transactions in the timeframe before and after the start of the incident.

Increased Comparison Range for Releases and Markers

Comparing data sets from different time periods can be very revealing when you want to evaluate the performance of a website. By extending the time frame from a maximum of 90 minutes to a maximum of one day, a whole day’s worth of data can now be included in the comparison of release events or markers. Fluctuations can be factored out much better, and thus results are more meaningful. You get more insight into what has really changed.

Crawler Detection

Crawlers can be recognized in Tideways and are now displayed with the tag “crawler”. Using filters, only the traces that were triggered by crawlers can be shown.

The identification of crawlers works based on user agents. It is not enabled by default and can be enabled with php.ini configuration change: tideways.features.crawler_detection=1

Documentation: Configuration Crawler Detection

Allow opt-in to show error messages in notifications

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve built this feature in response to quite a few customer requests and that it’s ready for use now. They asked us to make it easier for them to see exception messages directly in notifications, and we’re delighted to have done that for them.

Exception messages can be the key to determining the cause of an error easily. Since they could potentially contain private data, we initially decided against including them in notifications. 

However, as their importance can’t be underestimated, we now allow toggling to include error messages in email, Slack or Microsoft Teams notifications. The inclusion of error messages remains disabled by default due to privacy concerns.

Don’t get spooked by bad PHP performance. Try Tideways and get your remedy!

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Diana Diana 30.10.2024