How to Monitor Your Symfony Application with Vigilmon

Symfony is one of the most widely used PHP frameworks for building web applications, APIs, and enterprise systems. Whether you're running a small Symfony app or a large multi-bundle monolith, uptime monitoring is essential.

This guide shows you how to set up uptime and performance monitoring for your Symfony application using Vigilmon.

Why Monitor a Symfony Application?

Symfony apps can fail silently: a misconfigured bundle, a database timeout, or a failed queue worker may not produce an error page — they just degrade quietly. Monitoring catches these issues before your users do.

With Vigilmon, you can:

• Monitor HTTP endpoints every 30 seconds
• Alert via email, Slack, or PagerDuty when response time exceeds a threshold
• Track Symfony's health check routes (if you use the symfony/health-check-bundle)
• Publish a public status page for your users

Step 1: Expose a Health Check Endpoint

The fastest way is to add a lightweight health check controller:

<?php
// src/Controller/HealthController.php

namespace App\Controller;

use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\JsonResponse;
use Symfony\Component\Routing\Annotation\Route;

class HealthController
{
    #[Route('/health', name: 'health_check')]
    public function check(): JsonResponse
    {
        return new JsonResponse([
            'status' => 'ok',
            'timestamp' => time(),
        ]);
    }
}

If you need database connectivity checks:

<?php
// src/Controller/HealthController.php

namespace App\Controller;

use Doctrine\DBAL\Connection;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\JsonResponse;
use Symfony\Component\Routing\Annotation\Route;

class HealthController
{
    public function __construct(private Connection $db) {}

    #[Route('/health', name: 'health_check')]
    public function check(): JsonResponse
    {
        try {
            $this->db->executeQuery('SELECT 1');
            $dbStatus = 'ok';
        } catch (\Exception $e) {
            $dbStatus = 'error';
        }

        $status = $dbStatus === 'ok' ? 'ok' : 'degraded';
        $code = $status === 'ok' ? 200 : 503;

        return new JsonResponse([
            'status' => $status,
            'db' => $dbStatus,
            'timestamp' => time(),
        ], $code);
    }
}

Step 2: Secure the Health Check

For public health endpoints, keep them lightweight and return minimal info:

# config/packages/security.yaml
security:
    access_control:
        - { path: ^/health, roles: PUBLIC_ACCESS }

For internal metrics endpoints, restrict by IP or require an API key header.

Step 3: Add to Vigilmon

1. Sign up at vigilmon.online
2. Click Add Monitor
3. Enter your health check URL: https://yourapp.example.com/health
4. Set check interval: 1 minute (or 30 seconds on paid plans)
5. Set alert threshold: notify if response time > 2000ms or HTTP status != 200
6. Configure alert channels (email, Slack, webhook)

Step 4: Monitor Symfony Queue Workers

Symfony Messenger queue workers are critical but often unmonitored. Use a heartbeat monitor:

<?php
// src/MessageHandler/SomeMessageHandler.php

use Symfony\Contracts\HttpClient\HttpClientInterface;

class SomeMessageHandler
{
    public function __construct(private HttpClientInterface $http) {}

    public function __invoke(SomeMessage $message): void
    {
        // ... process message ...

        // Ping Vigilmon heartbeat to confirm worker is alive
        $this->http->request('GET', 'https://hb.vigilmon.online/your-heartbeat-id');
    }
}

Step 5: Set Up a Public Status Page

Vigilmon lets you create a public status page at status.vigilmon.online/your-slug showing real-time uptime for all your monitors.

Share this with your users so they can self-check before submitting support tickets.

What to Monitor in a Symfony App

Conclusion

Vigilmon gives your Symfony application production-grade monitoring without the complexity of self-hosted solutions. Set up your first monitor in under 5 minutes and get alerted before your users notice a problem.

Start monitoring your Symfony app — free tier available at vigilmon.online