In a new post to his blog Matthew Weier O'Phinney takes a look at a pretty cool feature of the Zend Server tool - the ability to directly monitor your Zend Framework applications.

When keeping tabs on your ZF applications, it's often difficult to separate application errors from general PHP errors, and if you aggregate them in the same location as your web server errors, this can become more difficult still. [...] Zend Server's Monitor extension has some capabilities for providing more context, and does much of this by default: request and environment settings available when the error was logged, the function name and arguments provided, and a full backtrace are available for you to inspect.

You can also trigger custom events via the extension's API and, to make it even easier, they've created a new writer for Zend_Log - Zend_Log_Writer_ZendMonitor. He includes a bit of sample code showing you how to create an instance of the component and log a sample citical message.