README

Live operational monitoring dashboard for Craft CMS 5. Know what's happening on your site right now and what needs attention.

Features

Live Traffic — Active visitors, requests per minute, top URLs, bot vs human breakdown
Editor Tracking — Who's logged in, what they're editing, collision warnings when two editors work on the same entry
Content Health — Entries by section, stale content detection, scheduled/expired entries, drafts awaiting attention, asset volume summaries
Queue Watch — Waiting/running/failed jobs, common failure patterns, queue health status
System Pulse — CPU, memory, disk, load average, DB response time, PHP info, uptime
Alerts — Automatic warnings for queue failures, editor collisions, server resource spikes
Dashboard Widget — Configurable at-a-glance summary card with auto-refresh
Full CP Section — Seven-tab deep dive (Overview, Live Traffic, Editors, Content Health, Queue Watch, System Pulse, Alerts)

Requirements

Craft CMS 5.0 or later
PHP 8.2 or later

Installation

With Composer

# If developing locally, add as a path repository first:
composer config repositories.control-tower path /path/to/craft-controltower

composer require justinholtweb/craft-controltower
php craft plugin/install control-tower

Manual

Copy the plugin to your project

Add the path repository to your composer.json:

"repositories": [
    { "type": "path", "url": "./plugins/control-tower" }
]

Run composer require justinholtweb/craft-controltower
Install via the CLI (php craft plugin/install control-tower) or through the CP under Settings > Plugins

Configuration

After installation, visit Control Tower > Settings in the control panel to configure:

Tracking

Setting	Default	Description
Track Visitors	On	Enable front-end visitor tracking via request logging
Track Editors	On	Track CP user activity and element editing
Track Server Metrics	On	Periodically sample CPU, memory, disk, and DB metrics
Collision Detection	On	Alert when multiple editors work on the same content

Refresh & Timeouts

Setting	Default	Description
Refresh Interval	30s	How often the dashboard auto-refreshes
Visitor Timeout	2 min	Minutes before a visitor is considered inactive
Editor Timeout	5 min	Minutes before an editor session is considered inactive

Data Retention

Setting	Default	Description
Visitor Data	30 days
Editor Data	90 days
Content Events	90 days
Metric Samples	30 days
Alert History	90 days

Alert Thresholds

Setting	Default	Description
Queue Failure Threshold	3	Failed jobs before triggering an alert
5xx Error Rate	10/min	Errors per minute before alert
404 Spike	50/min	404s per minute before alert
Stale Content	90 days	Days without update before flagging

Scheduled Jobs

Control Tower includes three queue jobs that should be run on a schedule via cron:

# Collect server metrics (every 1-2 minutes)
php craft queue/push justinholtweb\\controltower\\jobs\\CollectMetricsJob

# Run alert checks (every 5 minutes)
php craft queue/push justinholtweb\\controltower\\jobs\\RunAlertChecksJob

# Data retention cleanup (daily)
php craft queue/push justinholtweb\\controltower\\jobs\\CleanupJob

Or push them programmatically:

use justinholtweb\controltower\jobs\CollectMetricsJob;
use justinholtweb\controltower\jobs\RunAlertChecksJob;
use justinholtweb\controltower\jobs\CleanupJob;

Craft::$app->getQueue()->push(new CollectMetricsJob());
Craft::$app->getQueue()->push(new RunAlertChecksJob());
Craft::$app->getQueue()->push(new CleanupJob());

Dashboard Widget

Add the Control Tower widget to any user's dashboard. The widget is configurable:

Toggle visibility for each panel (visitors, editors, queue, server, alerts, content, top URLs)
Set a custom refresh interval
Resize to any column span

The widget links to the full CP section for deeper investigation.

Architecture

Plugin.php              → Event wiring, CP nav, settings
controllers/
  DashboardController   → 8 CP page actions
  ApiController         → 8 JSON endpoints for live polling
services/
  VisitorTrackingService   → Session-hash tracking, bot detection
  EditorTrackingService    → CP route parsing, collision detection
  ContentHealthService     → Stale/scheduled/expired content, pipeline
  QueueMonitorService      → Queue health, failed jobs
  MetricsCollectorService  → CPU/memory/disk/DB, cross-platform
  AlertService             → Alert lifecycle, automated checks
records/                → ActiveRecord models (6 tables)
migrations/Install.php → Database schema
jobs/                   → CleanupJob, CollectMetricsJob, RunAlertChecksJob
widgets/                → Dashboard widget
assets/                 → CSS + JS with auto-refresh polling
templates/              → CP section (7 tabs) + widget

Privacy

Visitor IP addresses are stored as SHA-256 hashes, never in plain text
User agents are hashed for bot detection grouping
Session identity uses a daily-rotating hash of IP + user agent
All tracking data is automatically purged based on retention settings
Visitor tracking can be fully disabled in settings

Roadmap

v1.5 — Trend charts (15m / 1h / 24h / 7d), per-section content health, 404 and error rate trends, configurable alert thresholds

v2 — Slack/email alert notifications, deployment awareness (git SHA, last deploy, environment), cache metrics, database slow query panel, multi-site comparisons

License

See LICENSE.md.

justinholtweb / craft-controltower

Maintainers

Package info

Statistics

Security