Brian Moon has a new post to his blog that pulls together some of his thoughts on monitoring PHP applications and how to handle the error that might be thrown.

PHP errors are just part of the language. Some internal functions throw warnings or notices and seem unavoidable. A good case is parse_url. The point of parse_url is to take apart a URL and tell me the parts. Until recently, the only way to validate a URL was a regex. You can now use filter_var with the FILTER_VALIDATE_URL filter. But, in the past, I would use parse_url to validate the URL. It worked as the function returns false if the value is not a URL. But, if you give parse_url something that is not a URL, it throws a PHP Warning error message. The result is I would use the evil @ to suppress errors from parse_url. Long story short, you get errors on PHP systems. And you don't need to ignore them.

He talks about the two-step process he's upgraded to to help monitor and handle the errors that pop up - an error handler that logs human-readable and json versions of the errors and something like Circonus to do metric tracking. He also mentions some external services recommended on twitter - HopToad and Loggly.