Short write‑ups of problems we hit running a real commerce operation and what we changed in the code because of them. No product announcements; just the reasoning.
When the application moved to long‑lived workers, the commercial APM agent we had run for years stopped telling the truth — and on the test runner it stopped the tests. We replaced it with NightOwl, an open‑source telemetry stack for Laravel: an agent on each box, a local buffer that survives outages, and every request, job, query, exception and log line landing as rows in a PostgreSQL database we own, on a server we already pay for, with retention measured in years. The best part arrived by accident — an AI assistant connected straight to that database with read‑only SQL.