New Feature: VIP Application Performance Monitoring (VIP APM)

VIP Application Performance Monitoring (VIP APM) is an integrated performance monitoring service for WordPress applications. It’s available today for all WordPress VIP customers at no additional cost and can be enabled in the VIP Dashboard.

How it works

When a page is slow, you open the Trace Explorer, pick a transaction, and follow the waterfall or flame view down to the function or query that costs the most time. 

VIP APM traces page requests, scheduled jobs, and WP-CLI commands. Each trace breaks the work down into its database queries, cache calls, external HTTP requests, and WordPress hooks, showing how long each one took and which plugin or theme it came from.

You can also filter transactions with simple queries to identify the requests you care about, such as slow admin pages or failed requests.

Why it matters

Performance problems in a WordPress application rarely come from one place. Knowing that a request is slow is only the start. Your team still has to work out what caused it.

VIP APM shows what’s slowing things down, whether that’s a hook in a plugin or theme, a query, or an outside service. Your developers find the cause, not just the symptom.

It requires no separate vendor or login. It’s all part of the platform you already use.

What is included

• Tracing for WordPress applications: Capture requests, errors, scheduled jobs, and WP-CLI commands on the WordPress VIP platform, including production and non-production environments.
• Performance overview: View throughput, errors, and response times for your environment at a glance.
• Trace Explorer: Browse traces and open waterfall and flame views to see where time goes inside a single request. Share a link to any trace with your team.
• Code ownership: See how much of a request’s time each plugin, must-use plugin, or theme takes.
• Databases: See your environment’s database activity in a single view, including slow queries, how long they take, and which requests run them.
• External requests: Spot which outside services your requests call and how long they wait on them.
• Query filters: Narrow the transaction list to exactly the requests you care about, such as a specific page, a slow response time, or errors.

VIP APM is currently available for WordPress environments; support for Node.js applications will come later. If you enabled VIP APM during our open beta, you can continue using it normally.

Get started

All customers can start using VIP APM today. Org and App Admins can enable it from the VIP Dashboard:

1. Select the application and environment.
2. Go to Performance → VIP APM.
3. Select “Enable”, review the confirmation, and confirm with “Enable VIP APM”.
4. Once the status shows “Enabled”, open “View in VIP APM”.
5. Open a transaction in the Trace Explorer to see your first trace. 

Once VIP APM is enabled, anyone with access to the environment can view it.

Learn more about VIP APM in our documentation, and join us on November 18 at 11:00 a.m. ET for a walkthrough of the tool in our next Developer Office Hours session. Register now in the Customer Hub and bring your questions to get answers live!