🔌 Watt Admin

Real-time monitoring and administration for your Platformatic applications

Watt Admin is an open-source developer monitoring tool that provides instant visibility into your Node.js services. Monitor performance, analyze logs, and troubleshoot issues—all from a single, intuitive dashboard.

✨ Features

📊 Performance Metrics

• Memory tracking: RSS, heap usage, new/old space allocation with interactive charts
• CPU monitoring: Real-time CPU and event loop utilization
• Latency analysis: P90, P95, P99 percentiles at a glance
• Request rates: Monitor requests per second across all services

📝 Centralized Logging

• View logs from all services in one place
• Filter by service or log level
• Toggle between formatted and raw JSON views
• Export logs for further analysis

🎯 Service Management

• Monitor service status at a glance
• Drill down into individual service metrics
• Compare performance across services
• Restart services directly from the dashboard

🔥 Profiling & Recording (New!)

• CPU profiling: Capture flame graphs to identify performance bottlenecks
• Heap profiling: Analyze memory allocation patterns
• Offline analysis: Generate self-contained HTML bundles for sharing and review
• Recording mode: Capture metrics and profiles over time for post-mortem analysis

🚀 Quick Start

Using npx (Recommended)

Launch Watt Admin with a single command:

npx wattpm admin

The dashboard will automatically discover your running Platformatic runtimes and open at http://localhost:4042.

Installation

Install globally for convenient access:

npm install -g @platformatic/watt-admin

Then run:

watt-admin

💡 Usage

Basic Usage

When you run watt-admin, it automatically discovers all available Platformatic runtimes:

$ watt-admin
Select a runtime: (Use arrow keys)
❯ my-app (PID: 12345) (Started at 3/10/2025, 10:00:00 AM)
  api-service (PID: 54321) (Started at 3/10/2025, 9:30:00 AM)

If only one runtime is running, it will be selected automatically.

Custom Port

Run Watt Admin on a different port:

watt-admin --port 4321

Recording Mode

Capture metrics and profiling data for offline analysis:

# Profile CPU usage
watt-admin --record --profile cpu

# Profile heap allocation
watt-admin --record --profile heap

When recording, press Ctrl+C to stop. Watt Admin will:

1. Collect all metrics and profiling data
2. Generate a self-contained HTML bundle
3. Automatically open the bundle in your browser

The generated HTML file contains everything you need for offline analysis—perfect for sharing with your team or reviewing later.

🏗️ Development

Prerequisites

• Node.js 18 or higher
• A running Platformatic runtime to monitor

Setup

git clone https://github.com/platformatic/watt-admin.git
cd watt-admin
npm install
cp .env.sample .env

Development Mode

Auto-reload both backend and frontend on changes:

npm run dev

Build

npm run build

Run Tests

# Run all tests
npm test

# Run specific test suites
npm run test:cli        # CLI tests
npm run test:backend    # Backend tests
npm run test:frontend   # Frontend tests
npm run test:e2e        # End-to-end tests

Project Structure

watt-admin/
├── cli.js              # CLI entry point
├── lib/                # Core CLI functionality
├── web/
│   ├── backend/        # Fastify API server
│   ├── frontend/       # React dashboard
│   └── composer/       # Platformatic Gateway
├── watt.json           # Wattpm configuration
└── test/               # Test suites

🎯 Use Cases

Development Workflow

Monitor your application while developing locally. Instantly see the impact of code changes on performance.

Debugging Performance Issues

Use CPU and heap profiling to identify bottlenecks and memory leaks before they reach production.

Team Collaboration

Generate offline HTML bundles to share performance data and profiling results with your team.

Learning and Optimization

Understand how your services behave under load and optimize based on real data.

🔗 Related Tools

For production monitoring and observability, check out Platformatic Console—the intelligent command center for Platformatic Cloud deployments.

📚 Documentation

• Platformatic Documentation
• Watt Admin Blog Post
• Platformatic Wattpm

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please check out our contributing guidelines to get started.

📄 License

Apache-2.0 License - see LICENSE for details.

🙋 Support

• GitHub Issues
• Discord Community
• Twitter

Built with ❤️ by the Platformatic team