Frequently Asked Questions

Which Payment methods do you accept?

Payments are managed by Recurly, which accepts most credit cards. We also accept money transfer on the Enterprise plan - contact us if you're interested.

What if I don't have Euros or US Dollars?

Provided you have an international card (Visa, MasterCard, etc.), your bank will make the conversion for you.

Are taxes included in the prices above?

Prices are excluding taxes. In some cases, VAT may be added to your bill and total amount charged, according to your country of residence's VAT rate on digital products and services.

What Network information are gathered?

The PHP probe gathers costs information about HTTP queries made through cURL. HTTP calls made through file_get_contents() are handled when using Guzzle or Buzz. More extensive support is coming soon. In order to prevent any leak of confidential data, URL parameters are removed before they ever hit blackfire.io's servers. The probe also gathers the number of bytes that go in and out of the PHP stream layer or cURL extension. This includes e.g. all network calls made using the socket or stream API (file_get_content, fgets...), the curl extension or the mysqlnd driver.

What SQL information are gathered?

The PHP probe gathers costs information about any SQL queries made using the PDO abstraction layer. Other drivers (mysql, mysqli, pgsql, etc.) are partially supported and will be fully handled soon. In order to prevent any leak of confidential data, SQL parameters are removed before they ever hit blackfire.io's servers.

What is an Environment?

Environments allow you to give profiling access to a group of people on the same app, server, or cluster of servers.

The Premium plan includes 1 environment of maximum 3 members. The Enterprise plan includes as many environments and members as you need.

What are Assertions?

Blackfire provides a way to define performance assertions in a .blackfire.yml file that you store along side your code. Assertions allows to configure absolute and relative thresholds to determine if a profile meets your own performance criteria.

What are Recommendations?

Any time you profile your code, Blackfire detects issues according to best practices defined by our performance experts. Resolution recommendations are shown on each corresponding profile, and are fully documented so that you can understand exactly why we recommend such a best practice, how to fix the issue, and how to add a non-regression test in your .blackfire.yml.

What are Builds?

Build reports are the result of running scenarios; they are environment specific, they need to be defined on the Blackfire.io Environment page. Builds can be started periodically, using the API or one of the integration (Platform.sh, Logmatic.io, New Relic...)

What are Notification Channels?

Notification Channels are used whenever a scenario is completed and a report is available; as they are environment specific, they need to be defined on the Blackfire.io Environment page. Notification Channels are webhooks, e-mails, or native integrations with third party services (such as GitHub, Slack, ...).

What is a Reference profile?

When profiling a web app with Blackfire, you will have the possibility to mark a profile as Reference Profile. Reference Profiles are stored forever, no matter which retention period is included in your plan. You will be able to easily compare new profiles versus reference profiles, and thereby check on the evolution of your app's performance throughout time and code modifications.

Is there any profile request limit?

For regular usages, you should never hit our generous 10,000 profiles per week per user.