The OpenTelemetry community has officially accepted Elastic's proposal to contribute the Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry for PHP (EDOT PHP) — marking an important milestone in bringing first-class observability to one of the web's most widely used languages.
For decades, PHP has powered everything from small business websites to large-scale SaaS platforms. Yet observability in PHP has often required manual setup, compilers, custom extensions, or changes to application code — challenges that limited adoption in production environments. This upcoming donation aims to change that, by making OpenTelemetry for PHP as easy to deploy as any other runtime.
What's coming
Once the contribution process is complete, EDOT PHP will become part of the OpenTelemetry project — providing a complete, production-ready distribution that's optimized for performance, simplicity, and scalability.
EDOT PHP introduces a new approach to PHP observability:
- Simple installation - installing OpenTelemetry for PHP will be as straightforward as installing a standard system package. From that point, the agent automatically detects and instruments PHP applications — no code changes, no manual setup.
- Automatic agent loading - works transparently in cloud and container environments without modifying application deployments.
- Zero configuration - ships as a single, self-contained binary; no need to install or compile any external extensions.
- Native C++ performance - a built-in serializer written in C++ reduces telemetry overhead by up to 5×.
- Automatic instrumentation - instruments popular frameworks and libraries out of the box.
- Inferred spans - reveals the behavior of even uninstrumented code paths, providing full trace coverage.
- Automatic root spans - ensures complete traces, even in legacy or partially instrumented applications.
- OpAMP readiness - while the OpenTelemetry community continues to standardize configuration schemas and management workflows, the implementation in EDOT PHP is fully prepared to support these upcoming specifications — ensuring seamless adoption once the OpAMP ecosystem matures.
- Asynchronous backend communication - telemetry data is exported to the OpenTelemetry Collector or backend asynchronously, without blocking the instrumented application. This ensures that span and metric exports do not add latency to user requests or impact response times, even under heavy load.
Together, these features make EDOT PHP the first truly zero-effort observability solution for PHP — from local testing to cloud-scale production systems.
The native C++ serializer and asynchronous export pipeline in EDOT PHP reduce average request time from 49 ms to 23 ms, more than 2× faster than the pure PHP implementation.
Building on the existing foundation
EDOT PHP doesn't replace the existing OpenTelemetry PHP SDK — it extends and strengthens it. It packages the SDK, automatic instrumentation, and native extension into a single, unified agent package that works seamlessly with existing OpenTelemetry specifications and APIs.
By contributing this work, Elastic helps the OpenTelemetry community accelerate PHP adoption, align implementations across languages, and make distributed tracing truly universal.
“This isn't a hand-off — it's a collaboration. We're contributing years of development to help OpenTelemetry for PHP evolve faster, run more efficiently, and reach more users in every environment.”
- Elastic Observability team
Ongoing improvements
Elastic continues to invest in advancing EDOT PHP ahead of its integration into OpenTelemetry. The team is currently focused on reducing resource usage and memory footprint, particularly in multi-worker server environments such as PHP-FPM or Apache prefork. These optimizations aim to make the agent more predictable and efficient under heavy load — ensuring that telemetry remains lightweight even in large-scale production deployments.
Beyond that, we're exploring further improvements that can enhance both performance and interoperability. Areas under investigation include smarter coordination in high-concurrency scenarios, better sharing of telemetry resources across workers, and future alignment with additional OpenTelemetry signals such as metrics and logs.
Together, these efforts will help make EDOT PHP not only faster, but also more adaptable and seamlessly integrated into diverse runtime architectures.
Why it matters
This contribution is about more than performance — it's about removing barriers. By making OpenTelemetry for PHP installable as a simple system package and automatically loaded into running applications, the project opens observability to every PHP developer, operator, and platform provider.
For the OpenTelemetry ecosystem, it fills one of the last major language gaps, extending visibility to a vast portion of the internet — all under open governance and community collaboration.
Looking ahead
In the months ahead, Elastic and the OpenTelemetry PHP SIG will work closely on the technical integration, documentation, and community onboarding process. Once the transition is complete, developers will gain a fully open, community-driven, and production-ready OpenTelemetry agent that “just works” — without friction, configuration, or code changes.
Together, we're building a future where observability just works — for every language, every framework, and every environment.
For more information:
EDOT documentation
Learn about OTLP Endpoint