Arkhè Watcher

In-app monitoring for Laravel — requests, exceptions, queries, jobs, commands, scheduled tasks, logs and mail — branched directly onto Arkhè Main with a Flux UI dashboard and a Watcher menu.

It reproduces the core of laraowl's application telemetry, but without a separate application to deploy. There is no server to host, no laraowl/client to point at it, no Reverb WebSocket server and no second queue: everything runs inside the host app and stores to a single table. Think Telescope/Pulse, wearing Arkhè's admin chrome.

Requirements

• PHP 8.3+
• adhocrat-io/arkhe-main ^3.2 (this package requires it and mounts onto it — the navigation registry it branches onto landed in 3.2.0)
• Livewire 4 + Flux 2 (already present in an Arkhè Main app)

Installation

composer require adhocrat-io/arkhe-watcher
php artisan arkhe:watcher:install

The installer:

1. publishes the config (config/watcher.php) and the migrations,
2. runs the migrations (creates watcher_entries and watcher_settings),
3. adds an @source line to resources/css/app.css so Tailwind scans the package's Blade views,
4. creates the view-watcher permission and grants it to the root and administrator roles.

That's it — open /administration/watcher.

The Watcher menu needs no sidebar patching: the package registers its own collapsible group into Arkhè Main's shared navigation registry (see below), and Arkhè Main's sidebar partial renders it. As long as your layout includes @include('arkhe::partials.sidebar-items') (Arkhè Main's installer wires that in), the menu appears automatically.

How it branches onto Arkhè Main

• Routes mount under Arkhè's admin prefix: {arkhe.admin.prefix}/watcher (e.g. /administration/watcher), named arkhe.watcher.*.

• Access uses Arkhè's web, auth and arkhe.backend middleware, plus this package's arkhe.watcher gate: an Arkhè root always passes, otherwise the user needs the view-watcher permission.

• Layout is resolved from config('arkhe.admin.layout'), so dashboard pages render inside your existing Arkhè shell.

• Menu — the package registers a watcher section on Arkhè Main's ArkheNav registry from its service provider (requires Arkhè Main ≥ 3.2):

  ArkheNav::section('watcher', heading: fn () => __('arkhe-watcher::watcher.menu'),
      priority: 90, can: /* root or view-watcher */)
      ->item('overview', fn () => __('…'), 'chart-bar', route: 'arkhe.watcher.index')
      // …one item per dashboard page
  

  This is the same mechanism any satellite package uses to branch onto Arkhè's backend — settings entries go into the shared settings ("Réglages") section, richer tools declare their own section like the Watcher does.

What it monitors

Dashboard pages

Overview (headline counts + recent exceptions + slowest requests), Requests, Exceptions (grouped, with occurrence counts), Queries (slow-only filter), Issues (query health — see below), Jobs (failed-only filter), Commands, Scheduled tasks, Logs (level filter) and Mail. Every page has a time-range filter (1h / 24h / 7d / 30d / all), free-text search, a detail flyout and live polling.

Query health — N+1, missing indexes & AI fixes

Reproducing the heart of wilfridterry/cardinal, the Issues page surfaces database problems the analyzer derives from each request's queries:

• N+1 detection — every query is normalised to a literal-free fingerprint (where id = ?); a fingerprint that fires more than WATCHER_NPLUSONE_THRESHOLD times in one lifecycle is flagged as an N+1, with the offending queries marked.
• Missing-index detection — a slow query filtering on an unindexed column is flagged (best-effort, via schema introspection), naming the table.column.
• AI fix suggestions (opt-in) — on the Issues detail flyout (and via php artisan arkhe:watcher:analyze <uuid>), the watcher asks Claude for a root-cause diagnosis and a concrete fix: a ready-to-run Laravel migration for a missing index, or the eager-loading change for an N+1. Enable with WATCHER_AI_ENABLED=true and an API key; it calls the Anthropic Messages API through Laravel's HTTP client (no extra package dependency), defaulting to claude-opus-4-8.

php artisan arkhe:watcher:issues prints the same report on the CLI.

Settings page

A root-only Settings page (arkhe.watcher.settings) lets you toggle the master switch and each collector, and adjust retention, HTTP sampling and the live-refresh interval — all from the UI. It is branched into Arkhè Main's shared Réglages section (not the Watcher group), so it sits next to every other package's settings. Values are stored in watcher_settings and layered over the config-file defaults at boot (collector toggles take effect on the next request).

How recording works

Each watcher subscribes to framework events and pushes an IncomingEntry into a buffered Recorder. The buffer is written in one bulk insert at the end of each lifecycle — HTTP terminate, job processed, command finished, scheduled task done — so monitoring stays off the request's critical path. Everything recorded during one lifecycle shares a batch_id.

Recording is fail-safe (storage errors are swallowed), governed by a master switch (WATCHER_ENABLED) and optional HTTP sampling (WATCHER_SAMPLING), and never records its own dashboard reads.

Configuration highlights

// config/watcher.php
'enabled'        => env('WATCHER_ENABLED', true),
'sampling'       => env('WATCHER_SAMPLING', 1.0),   // record this fraction of HTTP traffic
'retention_days' => env('WATCHER_RETENTION_DAYS', 7),
'slow'           => ['request' => 1000, 'query' => 100, 'job' => 5000], // ms
'poll_interval'  => env('WATCHER_POLL_INTERVAL', '10s'),
'connection'     => env('WATCHER_DB_CONNECTION'), // keep monitoring off your primary DB
'detectors'      => ['n_plus_one' => ['enabled' => true, 'threshold' => 5], 'missing_index' => ['enabled' => true]],
'ai'             => ['enabled' => false, 'model' => 'claude-opus-4-8', 'api_key' => env('WATCHER_AI_API_KEY', env('ANTHROPIC_API_KEY'))],

Point connection at a separate database to isolate monitoring writes. Lower sampling on busy production apps. Disable the cache watcher (default) unless you are actively tuning cache behaviour.

Commands

php artisan arkhe:watcher:install   # publish, migrate, wire the menu, grant access
php artisan arkhe:watcher:prune     # delete entries past retention (scheduled daily)
php artisan arkhe:watcher:prune --hours=6
php artisan arkhe:watcher:clear     # truncate everything (--force to skip the prompt)
php artisan arkhe:watcher:issues    # report N+1 / missing-index issues (--kind=, --hours=)
php artisan arkhe:watcher:analyze <uuid>  # AI diagnosis + fix for an issue (needs watcher.ai)

The daily prune is scheduled automatically (watcher.prune.schedule, default 0 2 * * *); it only runs if your app runs schedule:run.

Programmatic control

use Arkhe\Watcher\Watch;

Watch::pause();                       // stop recording
Watch::resume();
Watch::withoutRecording(fn () => /* noisy bulk op */);

Differences from laraowl

laraowl is a standalone monitoring server with a client agent. Arkhè Watcher is the single-app model, so a few laraowl features that fundamentally need external infrastructure are intentionally out of scope: uptime/heartbeat checks from an outside vantage point, the WAF/firewall threat engine, multi-tenant teams/projects, and real-time WebSocket streaming (replaced by lightweight polling). Everything that observes the app itself is covered.

Testing

composer install
composer test

The suite covers the recording engine, every watcher, pruning, the access gate and a full Flux render of all nine dashboard pages. tests/bootstrap.php falls back to the sibling arkhe-main package's vendor/ when this package has not been installed standalone, so the suite runs inside the monorepo without a second composer install.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.