Geocodio added Laravel Nightwatch to their production apps and instantly unlocked complete visibility across 160+ servers and hundreds of millions of HTTP requests.
Within days, Geocodio identified slow queries, caching inefficiencies, and performance issues that dev and staging environments had missed, with zero measurable overhead.
“I’m currently looking at a chart of 500M+ aggregate HTTP requests, and it took less than two seconds to load,” Mathias Hansen, CTO and co-founder, Geocodio said.
Monitoring with Laravel: A Bit of Background
Geocodio provides geocoding, reverse geocoding, and data enrichment for U.S. and Canadian addresses. They operate at scale, with 160+ high-throughput servers powering their public API and customer dashboard.
They joined the Nightwatch Early Access program to stress-test the Laravel-native monitoring tool in a real-world production environment. They were looking for effective Laravel performance monitoring, including full-spectrum visibility into live traffic, the ability to debug performance issues as they happened, and a way to drill into the experience of individual users without slowing down their systems.
Rolling Nightwatch Out at Scale
Geocodio rolled Nightwatch out in careful stages:
- Step 1: deployed to one shared app server
- Step 2: expanded to 10 after verifying no performance impact
- Step 3: rolled out to all 160 app servers in their standard environment
Throughout the rollout, they monitored CPU load, memory usage, and internal response times. Even after weeks at 100% traffic sampling, performance held steady.
“We didn’t detect any noticeable performance impact after running Nightwatch in production for weeks with a 100% sample rate,” Mathias said.
Sampling Made It Safe to Scale
With two apps in production—one powering their dashboard and one powering their public API—Geocodio used Nightwatch’s sampling feature to manage visibility and control load:
Dashboard: sampled 100% of traffic from day one
API: started at 10%, then ramped up to 100% after one week
Sampling allowed them to roll out Nightwatch to all servers, without exceeding their quota or impacting performance. When they switched to 100% sampling on their APIs, Nightwatch scaled effortlessly.
What Nightwatch Revealed
With live production data flowing in, Geocodio surfaced deep insights through Laravel monitoring that they couldn’t get anywhere else:
- Inefficient queries that were undetectable in staging
- Cache retrieval inefficiencies dragging on request time
- Overly aggressive caching that added unexpected latency
- Full visibility into Laravel jobs and commands, side by side with query logs and request traces
With Nightwatch, the Geocodio team knows where to focus their efforts, prioritizing the areas with the greatest engineering impact.
“The query log has been the most useful section so far. We’ve already found several issues we missed during testing,” Mathias said.
Observability That Feels Native
Geocodio’s feedback helped shape Nightwatch’s early developer experience. Some standout praise:
Performance: The dashboard is incredibly fast, even with over 550 million requests.
Drilldown: The team can switch from an aggregate view to a single request in just two clicks.
Laravel-native views: Jobs, Commands, Queries, Logs are all in one place.
Workflow-ready: The team can assign issues, add comments, and set priorities, no extra tooling needed.
They also helped refine deployment guidance, configuration options, and how Nightwatch agents run on multi-app servers.
What’s Next for Geocodio
Geocodio now runs Nightwatch across their entire app infrastructure in their standard environment and are planning to expand to their enterprise infrastructure next. With better visibility and real-time diagnostics, they’re spending significantly less time investigating and more time optimizing.
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark
“If you are serious about the user experience of your Laravel app, you have to include Nightwatch in your monitoring stack. Being able to catch and investigate performance issues live in production and explore an individual user’s experience with your app, including error tracking, has saved us hours of debugging and helps us deliver an even better experience for our customers.”
— Mathias Hansen, CTO & Co-Founder at Geocodio
Don’t be afraid of the dark. See what your Laravel app is really doing with Nightwatch.
