NightOwl Agent

Open-source Laravel monitoring agent. Captures telemetry from laravel/nightwatch and drains it into a PostgreSQL database you control.

What is this?

NightOwl Agent is an MIT-licensed Laravel package that:

1. Sits in front of laravel/nightwatch — Laravel's official observability SDK. Nightwatch already does the hard part: instrumenting all 12 record types — requests, queries, jobs, exceptions, commands, cache events, mail, notifications, outgoing HTTP, scheduled tasks, logs, users. The agent receives those payloads over a local TCP socket.
2. Buffers them in a local SQLite WAL — non-blocking ReactPHP ingest, ~13,400 payloads/s on a single instance.
3. Drains them into a PostgreSQL database you provision via the COPY protocol. Telemetry never leaves your network.

All tables are prefixed nightowl_ and the schema is documented. You're free to query the data with psql, point Metabase at it, or build your own UI on top — Livewire, Next.js, whatever.

Run it standalone

This package is fully usable on its own. Point it at a PostgreSQL database you control and you have a self-hosted Laravel APM:

Minimal .env (PostgreSQL credentials — that's it):

You don't need to wire up Nightwatch's transport — the service provider automatically redirects its ingest to the local agent on 127.0.0.1:2407. For a local-only setup you also don't need any token; the agent only enforces one if you set NIGHTOWL_TOKEN (useful when the agent listens on something other than loopback).

Tables fill up. Run any SQL you want against them.

What you get out of the box

These features run in the agent process. Postgres is the only thing it talks to.

• Exception fingerprinting — nightowl_exceptions upserts into nightowl_issues keyed on (group_hash, type, environment), so repeats roll up into one grouped issue.
• New-issue alerts — when an issue is seen for the first time the drain worker fans it out to whatever you've configured in nightowl_alert_channels: Email (BYO SMTP), Webhook (HMAC-signed), Slack, Discord.
• Threshold-based performance issues — set a threshold per record type (slow request, slow query, slow job, and so on), and durations above it get turned into issues.
• Agent + host health diagnosis — ring buffers and EWMA feed a rule engine that produces a health score and surfaces stalls (drain lag, buffer depth, CPU, memory, load average).
• Raw rows for every Nightwatch record type — all 12 sit in your Postgres. psql, Metabase, or your own UI on top.

Architecture

13,400 payloads/s on a single instance — ReactPHP non-blocking TCP ingest, SQLite WAL buffering, PostgreSQL COPY drain with synchronous_commit = off.

What the agent collects

Whatever Nightwatch emits, the agent persists. Each row carries duration (microseconds), environment, deploy, and the request/job correlation IDs Nightwatch attaches.

• Requests — method, route, path, status, duration, memory, user ID
• Jobs — queue, attempts, status (queued/processed/released/failed), exception link
• Queries — SQL, bindings, connection, duration, request correlation
• Exceptions — class, message, stack trace, fingerprint hash (upserted into nightowl_issues)
• Logs — level, message, context, request correlation
• Users — users_count upsert (request + exception counters per authenticated user)
• Cache events, mail, notifications, outgoing HTTP, scheduled tasks, commands — same shape as Nightwatch
• Host metrics — CPU, memory, load average (Linux /proc)
• Agent self-health — ingest/drain rates, buffer depth, back-pressure, diagnosis rules

P95s, N+1 detection, slow-query rankings, request timelines, etc. are queries you write against these tables.

Requirements

• PHP 8.2+ with extensions: pdo_pgsql, pdo_sqlite (always), pcntl + posix (for the async driver), zlib (for gzipped payloads)
• PostgreSQL 14+ (16 or 17 recommended)
• Laravel 11 or 12

Data ownership & privacy

The agent writes telemetry directly to your PostgreSQL database. Zero request, query, or exception data leaves your infrastructure.

The only thing the agent can send outbound, and only if you opt in to remote health reporting, is agent/host health metadata (ingest rates, buffer depth, drain lag, CPU/memory), so a remote backend can warn you when the agent is unhealthy.

The schema is documented and stable, so your data stays usable even if you stop running the agent.

Optional: the hosted dashboard

If you'd rather not build and maintain a UI, usenightowl.com is a managed service that connects to your Postgres with credentials you supply (and can rotate or revoke at any time). It adds an issue lifecycle UI (resolve / ignore / reopen, assignees, comments, activity timeline), alerts for those state transitions, teams, and an MCP server for AI tools. The agent itself stays MIT and works the same with or without it.

Full guide: docs.usenightowl.com

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. See GitHub Issues.

License

MIT.

Related

• Docs — docs.usenightowl.com