Tideways 2026.1 Release

We’re rolling out a new wave of improvements across Tideways in our first Release of 2026, focusing on deeper visibility, smarter automation, and broader ecosystem support.

From automatic tracepoints for selected transactions and improved exception workflows to enhanced FrankenPHP worker-mode instrumentation, these features continue to reduce manual effort while increasing observability.

We’ve also expanded tracing capabilities: distributed tracing now activates automatically alongside tracepoints, and session performance is measured in a dedicated layer to help uncover locking bottlenecks. Shopware users benefit from new invalidate-cache tagging for better HTTP cache debugging, while Redis users gain key-level visibility with improved phpredis instrumentation.

Framework support continues to grow with automatic instrumentation for Tempest and Yii3, alongside improved deployment support for (Open)LiteSpeed environments. On the performance side, Tideways can now flag costly Symfony polyfill usage and recommend native extensions where beneficial.

Finally, observation data is now accessible via the REST API, making it easier to integrate detected bottlenecks into your own workflows.

As always, these updates aim to help you spot performance issues faster and spend less time on manual setup.

Summary

Automatic Tracepoints for Selected Transactions

You can now create automatic tracepoint triggers for specific selected transactions, provided that you have a Business or Enterprise plan with advanced tracepoint triggers.

Select the “Tracepoint Trigger” option from the settings dropdown on either the transaction details page or the transaction settings list.

Then configure the schedule to be daily, weekly, or monthly and the duration of the tracepoint to get started.

Acknowledge Errors and Exceptions

It’s now possible to acknowledge errors/exceptions from the error details screen, and if you don’t acknowledge an error, it will send another notification every 24 hours until it is either acknowledged, ignored, or resolved.

This helps with the situation where a notification for a new exception is overlooked accidentally and never seen again.

For all projects created before February 2026, the notification on unacknowledged errors is disabled by default. You can enable it in the settings for the “New Exception” notification.

Documentation: Error Tracking Workflow Options

Worker-Mode for FrankenPHP

Running FrankenPHP in worker mode now automatically recognizes every request run in the main loop, calling frankenphp_handle_request. There are no code changes required in your application to get the same support as with PHP-FPM or Apache mod_php.

This is based on the automated worker mode instrumentation, previously introduced for job queues.

Previously, implementing the necessary code changes was particularly difficult when the framework itself provided the worker script, in the case of Symfony and its Runtime component.

Tracepoints and Distributed Tracing

If distributed tracing is enabled in the PHP extension, it is now automatically activated for requests with an active tracepoint

Previously, distributed tracing was only activated for developer-triggered requests via the Chrome Extension or CLI.

Documentation: Distributed Tracing

Session Layer

Tideways now measures the time spent on session-related operations in a dedicated session layer. This primarily supports detecting blocking session performance issues due to locking, as previously described in our blog.

This includes both loading the session and updating session data when the request completes.

Supported frameworks include PHP’s session extension (including Symfony), Laravel, and WoltLab Suite.

Invalidate-Cache-Tag for Shopware

To improve our HTTP Cache debugging support from the 2025.3 release, we now add an “invalidate-cache” tag to all traces that trigger invalidation of any item in the Shopware HTTP cache. This works for both use cases of direct or deferred invalidation.

This feature should help you detect requests that are invalidating the cache unexpectedly and which may contribute to a bad page cache hit rate.

The detailed trace view then shows which cache item keys were invalidated with the timeline “markers”.

phpredis Key Instrumentation

In addition to Predis and Credis support, instrumentation for the ext/redis (phpredis) extension now includes support for collecting the key accessed by a command.

Documentation: Advanced Instrumentation

Tempest support

With Extension 5.34.0, Tideways adds automatic instrumentation for the Tempest framework, one of the newer additions to the PHP ecosystem.

This includes automatically detecting controllers as transaction names, instrumenting the framework’s exception handlers to capture errors, and creating template engine and event spans to provide additional context.

Yii3 support

We also support the new Yii3 version released at the turn of the year. This includes transaction name detection and exception handling.

(Open)LiteSpeed support

The tideways-php Debian Package now also supports installing Tideways for LSWS, installing the Tideways Extension and the INI configuration template into the correct directories.

Polyfill Bottleneck

Tideways now detects if you use a Symfony Polyfill API (Mbstring, Intl, ..) and it takes up enough time of a request that installing the actual PHP extension would give you a significant performance improvement.

Make observations available via REST API

You can now query the REST API for observation data that show detected monitoring, configuration, and code bottlenecks with detailed problem and solution information.

Due to the highly flexible nature of each problem, the list only contains metadata for now and a link to the application where the detailed information is available.

Documentation: Observations API

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Diana Diana 25.02.2026