Running the Daemon on a dedicated host

Some operational scenarios require the Tideways Daemon to run on a dedicated collection host that is different from the PHP application servers. This is not a recommended deployment scenario for dedicated/virtualized environments, but it is the recommended approach when using Docker.

Usually the PHP applications communicate with the daemon using a UNIX socket for improved networking speed, but this can be changed to be any TCP/IP port in the network.

As an example we are deploying the daemon on a local node with the ip+port 10.6.168.2:9135. The following change to the configuration file /etc/default/tideways-daemon enables this:

TIDEWAYS_DAEMON_EXTRA="--address=10.6.168.2:9135"

This changes the way the daemon runs, and the PHP applications need to know this location to stop logging on the local socket. This is possible system wide using the PHP extensions INI settings:

/etc/php/7.3/conf.d/40-tideways.ini
tideways.connection=tcp://10.6.168.2:9135

Now the extensions log to those addresses instead and the tideways-daemon on the dedicated host can collect the data for you.

Downsides:

Usually tideways-daemon transmits server name of the application server, but now a central daemon could collect data for multiple servers. You should therefore use --hostname to give the central daemon a meaningful name.

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