Open-Source Laravel APM Tools in 2026

No. NightOwl is commercial, proprietary software. We chose a commercial model so we can sustainably maintain the product without the tension of a dual-license or pay-to-self-host play. If open source is a hard requirement, Laravel Telescope is the best Laravel-specific OSS option; for general APM, OpenTelemetry + Grafana or SigNoz.

Laravel Telescope is the only OSS tool with first-party Laravel support for requests, queries, jobs, cache, and exceptions. It's a development debugger, not a production APM — but for dev and staging, it's unmatched. For production OSS, you typically combine OpenTelemetry PHP instrumentation with a backend like Grafana Tempo or SigNoz and build the Laravel-specific dashboards yourself.

Not by the OSI definition. Sentry switched from a BSD license to the Business Source License (BUSL) in 2019. BUSL lets you self-host for most uses but prohibits offering Sentry as a commercial service. The source is public, but 'open source' is technically inaccurate.

You can, but most teams shouldn't. Telescope writes telemetry synchronously into your database on every request — every query, every job, every cache event. At any real traffic, this bloats your primary database and slows requests measurably. Use it locally and in staging; pair it with a production-grade tool like NightOwl or Nightwatch Cloud for live environments.

OpenTelemetry is a specification + SDKs for emitting traces, logs, and metrics in a vendor-neutral format. In Laravel, you install the OTel PHP SDK and manually instrument the events you care about (HTTP requests, DB queries, queue jobs). The telemetry ships to an OTel Collector, which forwards it to your backend of choice (Grafana Tempo, SigNoz, Jaeger, or a SaaS vendor). It's powerful but you're doing the instrumentation work the Nightwatch package does automatically for Laravel.

Prometheus excels at metrics (counters, gauges, histograms) but not at per-request traces or structured logs. You can expose Laravel metrics via something like spatie/laravel-prometheus-exporter, but you won't get the trace view, query grouping, or exception context that APMs provide. Prometheus is a complement to an APM, not a replacement.

None, deeply. Telescope records them for debugging but doesn't aggregate across production traffic. OpenTelemetry + Grafana can surface them as generic spans if you instrument them. For actual Laravel-aware queue and scheduled-task monitoring (per-job-class percentiles, per-task invocation history with duration trends, auto-resolve of stale exception issues) you're looking at commercial tools — Nightwatch Cloud, NightOwl, Inspector.

Yes: Telescope for dev, Sentry (or GlitchTip) for production errors, OTel + Grafana Tempo for traces, Prometheus + Grafana for metrics. Many teams run this stack. The tradeoff is operational — you're running 5-10 services instead of installing one tool. For teams that value their time over strict OSS purity, commercial Laravel-first APMs usually win on total cost of ownership.