Monitor your application with Nightwatch

3 min read Updated 1 day ago

Monitor your application with Nightwatch

Nightwatch adds lightweight monitoring and observability to your Laravel or Statamic application. It watches your application as it runs and reports the details back to your Nightwatch account, so you can see slow queries, errors, requests and queue jobs in one place.

It is a Custom services entry you add alongside your application. As a sidecar it shares your application's lifecycle: it starts and stops with it, and there is nothing separate to manage or restart.

Adding Nightwatch

  1. Go to your application and add a new service.
  2. Pick Nightwatch.
  3. Enter your NIGHTWATCH_TOKEN. This is the authentication token for the Nightwatch API, and you get it from your Nightwatch account for the project you want to send data to. It is required, so you will need it before you can create the service.
  4. Create the service.

That is all it takes. During the next deployment the sidecar starts, the required environment variables are injected into your main application, and Nightwatch begins reporting.

What it monitors

Nightwatch captures the usual sources of trouble in a running application:

  • Database queries and how long they take
  • Exceptions as they are thrown
  • HTTP requests, so you can spot slow endpoints and high traffic
  • Queue jobs, including failures and durations

The token you entered is used to authenticate with the Nightwatch API, and the data lands in your Nightwatch project.

Configuring it

The token is shown directly on the create form. The rest of the settings live under Advanced settings in either the create modal or, after the service exists, Edit resources > Service configuration. None of them are required, and each has a sensible default.

  • NIGHTWATCH_SAMPLE_RATE is the percentage of requests to sample. Default is 100; anywhere from 1 to 100. Lower it on busy applications if you want to cut the volume of data reported.
  • NIGHTWATCH_LOG_LEVEL is the log level Nightwatch reports at, one of debug, info, warning or error. Default is info.
  • NIGHTWATCH_CAPTURE_QUERIES captures database queries. Default is true.
  • NIGHTWATCH_CAPTURE_EXCEPTIONS captures and reports exceptions. Default is true.
  • NIGHTWATCH_CAPTURE_REQUESTS captures HTTP request details. Default is true.
  • NIGHTWATCH_CAPTURE_JOBS monitors queue jobs. Default is true.

Set any of the capture flags to false to stop Nightwatch collecting that kind of data.

About resources and lifecycle

Because Nightwatch is a sidecar, its resource usage is fixed and modest, so the memory and instance controls are not shown. It runs the Nightwatch agent image, a lightweight companion to your application, so there is nothing to restart and no separate debug access. Its logs are written to the same place as your application's, so look there if you need them.

Environment variables

On deployment, Nightwatch injects the following variables into your main application so the agent picks up your configuration:

  • NIGHTWATCH_ENABLED is set to true.
  • NIGHTWATCH_TOKEN is your token (from the primary setting).
  • NIGHTWATCH_SAMPLE_RATE, NIGHTWATCH_LOG_LEVEL and the four NIGHTWATCH_CAPTURE_* flags reflect whatever you set in the panel, using their defaults when you left them alone.

You only see this service for Laravel and Statamic applications, which is where the agent works.