At Laracon AU 2024, the Laravel team dropped a bombshell—introducing Laravel Nightwatch, an all-in-one, real-time monitoring platform built specifically for Laravel applications. Gone are the days of juggling multiple tools to keep tabs on your app’s health. Nightwatch pulls everything into a single, intuitive dashboard, making it easy to track performance, spot bottlenecks, and catch issues before they escalate.
Seamless Integration with Forge and Vapor
One of its biggest strengths? Nightwatch works effortlessly with Laravel Forge and Vapor. Whether you’re running your app on traditional servers or a fully managed cloud environment, it just works. Laravel made this a key point during the announcement—this isn’t just another monitoring tool. It’s built for Laravel developers, by Laravel developers.
What Exactly Does Nightwatch Do?
Nightwatch takes Laravel monitoring to the next level. Built on top of Laravel Pulse, it transforms application tracking into a real-time, always-on dashboard. Unlike Pulse, which mainly works in production, Nightwatch starts monitoring from your local environment. This means you can catch performance issues, bottlenecks, and bugs long before they reach users. No more waiting until deployment to realise something’s off.
Key Metrics Tracked by Nightwatch
Right out of the box, Nightwatch provides a full suite of monitoring tools, covering everything from user activity to system performance:
- Application Usage – Tracks who’s making the most requests, which endpoints are slowest, and which jobs are being dispatched the most.
- Server Statistics – Monitors CPU, memory, and disk usage across all your servers.
- Queue Monitoring – Gives real-time and historical data on pending, failed, and completed jobs, plus outgoing requests.
- Trending Exceptions – Provides a live overview of errors before they become serious problems.
- Cache Usage – Tracks cache key performance, including hits and misses, helping you optimise your app.
- Outgoing Requests – Measures how long your HTTP client requests take, so you can fine-tune performance.
Advanced Features That Set Nightwatch Apart
But Nightwatch doesn’t stop there. It also brings in powerful features to help you stay ahead of performance issues:
- Real-Time Performance Tracking – Get instant feedback on how your app is running and spot issues as they happen.
- Automated Alerts – Receive notifications via email or Slack for critical events, so you’re always in the loop.
- Zero-Config Setup – Works straight out of the box with Laravel Forge, Vapor, or any custom setup—no extra configuration needed.
Nightwatch Dashboard Overview
Nightwatch is built to make Laravel developers’ lives easier. With seamless integration, deep insights, and real-time tracking, it keeps your app running smoothly from local development to production. No more guessing games—just actionable data that helps you build faster and smarter.
What Makes It Different?
What makes Nightwatch a game-changer compared to Laravel Pulse, Telescope, and big-name tools like DataDog and Dynatrace? Simplicity.
Just run composer install, deploy your app, and boom—you’ve got an insanely detailed dashboard tracking every critical metric. No setup headaches. No complicated configurations.
It also includes powerful filters and next-level insights like P95—which hones in on the slowest 5% of requests. This makes it easy to identify bottlenecks and crush performance killers like N+1 queries before they tank your app.
Designed Specifically for Laravel
Unlike generic monitoring tools that try to cater to every tech stack, Nightwatch is built exclusively for Laravel. This means it’s optimised for Laravel’s architecture, making it faster, more efficient, and ridiculously easy to use.
And the best part? It’s completely hands-off. No tedious setup. No endless tweaking. Just real-time, automatic monitoring—right out of the box.
What This Means for Laravel Developers
For Laravel developers, Nightwatch isn’t just another tool—it’s a complete shift in how we monitor and optimise our apps. Paired with Laravel Cloud, announced at Laracon US 2024, it’s clear that Laravel is going all-in on making development smoother, faster, and more powerful than ever before.
With purpose-built solutions for performance tracking, infrastructure management, and scaling, developers can now focus more on building great products—not wrestling with complex monitoring setups.
Nightwatch delivers real-time insights from local dev all the way to production. No more last-minute surprises when your app goes live. The future of Laravel? Faster, smarter, and more developer-friendly than ever. And we’re here for it!