Usage

CP Section

Control Tower adds a main navigation item in the Craft control panel. The visible subnav depends on which permissions a user has:

Overview — At-a-glance summary of all monitoring areas
Live Traffic — Active visitors, requests per minute, top URLs, bot vs. human breakdown, and traffic timelines
Editors — Active editor sessions, collision warnings, draft counts, and activity timelines
Content Health — Entries by section, stale content, scheduled/expired entries, pending drafts, and content pipeline
Queue Watch — Queue status, failed jobs with error details, common failure patterns, and queue health
System Pulse — CPU, memory, disk, load average, DB ping, PHP memory, uptime, and metric timelines
Alerts — Active and historical alerts with severity levels
Alert Rules — Define which metrics fire alerts and who gets notified (requires Manage alert rules and webhooks)
Webhooks — Manage Slack, Teams, and generic JSON destinations (requires Manage alert rules and webhooks)
Settings — Plugin settings (requires Edit Control Tower settings)

Dashboard Widget

Add the Control Tower widget to your Craft dashboard from Settings → Dashboard. The widget is configurable with toggles for seven display panels:

Visitors
Editors
Queue
Server
Alerts
Content
Top URLs

Set a custom refresh interval (minimum 5 seconds) and resize the widget to any column span.

Cron Jobs

Control Tower includes three queue jobs that should be triggered via cron for optimal monitoring:

Collect Metrics

Run every 1–2 minutes to collect server metric snapshots:

*/1 * * * * php /path/to/craft queue/run

Run Alert Checks

Run every 5 minutes to check for queue failures, editor collisions, and server resource issues.

Cleanup

Run daily to purge expired data based on your retention settings.

Privacy

Control Tower is designed with privacy in mind:

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
Data purging is automatic based on configurable retention settings
Visitor tracking can be fully disabled in settings

Permissions

As of 5.1.0, Control Tower registers three granular permissions under the Control Tower heading in user group and user permission screens:

Permission	Key	Grants
View Control Tower dashboards	`controltower:viewDashboard`	Access to Overview, Live Traffic, Editors, Content Health, Queue Watch, System Pulse, and Alerts
Manage alert rules and webhooks	`controltower:manageAlerts`	Add, edit, and delete alert rules and webhook destinations
Edit Control Tower settings	`controltower:manageSettings`	Edit plugin settings (tracking, retention, intervals)

The CP navigation hides any subnav item the current user lacks permission for, so non-admin teams can be granted scoped read-only or alert-management access.

Alerts & Notifications

Alert rules and webhook destinations are managed from the control panel. See Alerts & Webhooks for a full walkthrough of the metric registry, supported destinations, email recipients, severity, flap throttling, and notify-on-resolve.