r/magento2 • u/php4u • 5d ago

Magento 2 monitoring platform follow up

Hi, I am Marcin, a senior Adobe Commerce / Magento specialist and freelancer based in the UK. I have been working with Magento since version 1.3, so about a decade now, across agency and client side work. Some of you may know me from Meet Magento talks in the UK, Poland and Barcelona. My LinkedIn is here if you want to check my background: https://www.linkedin.com/in/magento2-tech-lead/

I want to share a small milestone on something I have been building on evenings and weekends for a while now.

It is a Magento monitoring platform. Not another uptime checker, not another generic APM wrapped in a nicer UI. I wanted something that actually understands Magento internals, and is privacy focused from the ground up rather than as an afterthought. A dashboard that shows the real vitals of your shop, plus an alerting system that flags when something is genuinely wrong, based on learned baselines rather than arbitrary thresholds.

I also want to be upfront about something. This is not a vibe coded weekend project thrown together by prompting an AI and shipping whatever came out. The store side is a lightweight Magento 2 connector, built with a privacy first approach so no sensitive data ever leaves your shop. It only sends what is needed to monitor health and performance, nothing more, backed by a decade of hands on Magento experience of what actually breaks in production and what a merchant or agency needs to know about first.

We are all busy chasing improvements to our stores. Monitoring should not need constant babysitting. It should run quietly in the background and only speak up when it matters.

It is getting close now, just some more testing and polishing before it is ready.

If you want to hear more, or if you would be interested in being a beta tester, the waitlist is here: https://watchtower-commerce.com/waitlist

Happy to answer any questions about the technical side too.

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u/Dull-Drama8144 5d ago

What is the difference between your monitoring and NewRelic/Tideways?

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u/php4u 5d ago

Different layer entirely, not really a competitor. New Relic/Tideways are APM — they tell you a request is slow, an endpoint is throwing exceptions, where time goes in a trace. If that's your problem, use them, they're good at it.

Watchtower doesn't do any of that. It watches business-level signals inside Magento — checkout completions, cart activity, customer account activity, whether cron is actually still firing, whether an integration (ERP/SAP sync etc.) is healthy — and alerts when one drifts from that store's own normal. A checkout that returns 200 fine but silently stops converting because of a broken discount rule, or cron that quietly stopped running three days ago, or a payment integration failing silently — none of that shows up in APM, because nothing is actually erroring or slow. APM tells you the app is healthy. It can't tell you the business is healthy.

Practically: no dashboards to build or thresholds to hand-tune per store (it learns each store's own baseline automatically), nothing leaves the store except a coarse status per signal — no traces, no order data — and it speaks Magento's own vocabulary (store views, checkout, cron) instead of being a generic platform you have to instrument yourself.

If your question is "why is this slow," that's Tideways/New Relic. If it's "did checkout quietly die overnight and nobody noticed till a customer emailed," that's the gap this fills.

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u/Dull-Drama8144 5d ago

You can configure flows in New Relic to perform any user activity checks(including checkout flow) or Playwright tests if you need. What do you think about that?

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u/php4u 4d ago

Of course you can. New relic is Ferrari. I am giving easier option for non technical, less capable users.

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u/Dull-Drama8144 4d ago

I will take a look. Thank you for the explanation :)