Transactions
Monitoring and Profiling yields much better data if you can assign a transaction name to every request that is triggered in your application.
If you don’t do this, then every transaction will automatically get the name 'default' in version 4 and the last two parts of SCRIPT_FILENAME (for example web/index.php) in version 5.
If you are using an MVC framework with controllers and actions, then a separation into the controller class and action method names for the transaction names yields much better results. Look at PHP-Extensions-API-Calls to detect Transaction Names in your application code.
Compare these two results that you get on your application dashboard, the first one using only default transaction:
and the second one collecting data with transaction names:
Adding transaction names allows you to see bottlenecks, number of requests and response times for each of these transaction individually, including historical data and graphs. Additionally it will group the profiling traces based on these transactions.
Configuring Human Readable Names
After you have started using transaction names based on framework or manual support you can go one step further with the configuration and set a human readable name for all the transactions, or just the ones you care about the most. This will improve the utility of Tideways, because it frees you from having to know what page each listed controller/action is actually responsible for, especially for the non-technical users in the weekly report.
For example in the transaction list:
Or in the transaction detail page:
You can configure the human readable names in the "Application Settings" screen, then click on "Configure Transactions".
Click on the pencil button on the right to open a dialog for each transaction, where you can enter the human readable name of the transaction and then save your change.