Keeping an eye on performance with Laravel Nightwatch

We were thrilled to be invited to the early access program for Laravel Nightwatch, the new application monitoring product built specifically for the Laravel ecosystem. Since then, we’ve been running it across several of our Statamic sites and Laravel applications.

Nightwatch is designed from the ground up with Laravel developers in mind. It collects, presents, and organises data in a way that feels genuinely helpful to us as Laravel developers, and provides detailed insights in to the performance of our sites. Whether we’re building a Statamic site, or a full custom Laravel app, both are built on Laravel, so we live and breathe it every day.

With Nightwatch, we can monitor site and app performance in real time. It gives us valuable insight into what’s happening behind the scenes, whether that’s identifying slowdowns, catching unexpected errors, or checking that background jobs are running smoothly. This level of visibility allows us to proactively improve performance, prevent issues, and make sure that features like jobs, queues and email are working exactly as they should.

With Nightwatch, we’ve been able to monitor the performance of our sites and apps in real time: this becomes an invaluable tool for us to see where the site may be running slower than anticipated, where an error many have occurred, or how different features like background jobs are running. This level of visibility helps us drive improvements to our sites to make them run more efficiently, without errors, and ensure all of the app’s features – like jobs, queues and email – are running as expected.

What does this mean for you?

You won’t notice any visible changes: and that’s the point. Nightwatch is on guard when we’re not, monitoring your app when we’re out of the office, and notify us when things don’t go according to plan. This means we can respond quickly if something goes wrong, and use its information to review what has taken place, and help guide improvements to performance and reliability.

We take pride in the work we deliver, and tools like Nightwatch help us ensure that you and your users continue to enjoy a fast, stable and seamless experience.

As of this writing, Nightwatch is still in early access, but the public release is imminent. We’ll be adding Nightwatch to our on-going toolkit that allow us to provide our pro-active support and reliable up-time for every site we manage.