FAQs
Frequently asked questions about Nightwatch
The Basics
Nightwatch is purpose-built for Laravel and deeply integrates with the framework’s internals — from queues and events to the request lifecycle. This tight integration is what allows us to offer zero-config setup, rich telemetry, and smart insights. Supporting generic PHP would mean compromising on that experience, so we’ve chosen to go deep rather than broad.
An event in Nightwatch covers anything you’d need to monitor your application: requests, outgoing requests, notifications, jobs, queries, mail, commands, cache, and scheduled tasks. For more information, see Events.
Nightwatch is designed to add minimal overhead to your application, typically less than 3ms per request. The agent runs separately from your application process to ensure minimal impact.
Yes, Telescope and Pulse are free, lightweight open source packages that we will continue to support. If you’re curious on the difference between each product check out our Telescope and Pulse comparison pages.
Once you’ve consumed all of the events included in your plan, Nightwatch will pause event ingestion from your application.
To continue sending events, you have two main options:
- Upgrade your plan to a higher tier. This increases your quota immediately for the remainder of the billing cycle.
- Enable Additional Events, which lets you continue ingesting beyond your quota. These are billed per 100k events, up to the limit you set in your billing settings and are invoiced at the end of your current billing cycle.
To avoid hitting your limit unexpectedly, we recommend experimenting with sampling to reduce event volume while maintaining meaningful visibility.
If your organization requires 1B+ events, please get in contact with us and we’ll be happy to help you.
Setup and Integration
Yes, Nightwatch supports the majority of hosting providers and setups. We’ve published guides for Laravel Cloud and Laravel Forge, as well as for running on a regular server. If you have a serverless setup, like Laravel Vapor, you’ll need to create a virtual machine on another server to run Nightwatch. If you’re using something else, let us know — we’re happy to help.
Yes, you can use Nightwatch in development environments. We strongly recommend creating a dedicated environment for development to keep your metrics clean.
Set NIGHTWATCH_ENABLED=false in your .env file to temporarily disable
Nightwatch without removing the package. For more information, see our Agent
Configuration guide.
Yes, you can use Nightwatch alongside other APM (Application Performance Monitoring) tools simultaneously. There are no technical limitations preventing you from running multiple monitoring solutions in parallel. That said, running multiple monitoring tools will have some cumulative performance impact that will need to be mitigated.
Business and Compliance
By default, the maximum amount you’ll be charged each month is your subscription fee. If you choose to enable Additional Events, you can set a spending cap by defining the maximum number of additional events you’d like to ingest beyond your plan’s limit. Once that limit is reached, Nightwatch will automatically stop ingesting new events to prevent further charges.
You can configure the Nightwatch agent to redact sensitive information before it’s transmitted. This happens in the open source package installed in your application, so you have complete control over what data is sent.
Nightwatch currently offers data storage in the US and EU. We’re working on supporting additional regions. Please contact us if you require data residency in a specific region.
By default, we store data for 90 days, but longer retention windows are available on our enterprise plans. Get in touch if you need a custom retention window.
Nightwatch is actively pursuing SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 certifications.
Nightwatch is a fully-managed product.
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