performance_schema only ever tells you what happened since the server booted. Sailfish reads it every five minutes from inside your Laravel app and stores what moved, so when was this index last used? still has an answer after a restart. It charts how each index and table is read, and sends mail or Slack when something changes.
$ composer require boring-o11y/my-sailfish
Then migrate. It schedules its own collection, and the first snapshot lands within five minutes.
or read the docs first
sailfish:collect schedules itself and stores what moved since the last snapshot.
A reboot starts a new generation of counters instead of a history that goes negative.
The history lives in tables in your own database, on the connection you choose.
A dashboard served by your own app, behind a gate you define.
Alerts
Every collection ends by running the detectors over the stored history. The surges compare the last hour with the same hour on each of the previous seven days, so a nightly batch that always scans at 03:00 is its own baseline and pages nobody. Slower findings, like an index nothing reads, wait for the morning digest.
SAILFISH_NOTIFY_CHANNELS=mail,slack SAILFISH_NOTIFY_MAIL=db-team@example.com SAILFISH_SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL="https://hooks.slack.com/..."
Indexes
Every index with its status (hot, cold, never used or dropped), last use, size and 30 days of reads and writes. One read in the 14 days before last week and not since is flagged cold. One with no read in 30 days is flagged never used, with what its writes cost and whether another index covers it.
Tables
When a migration drops an index, or a deploy ships a query that cannot use one, the scanned line climbs as the index line falls. Each table page splits its reads by index and charts the time spent waiting for table locks and its size, read once a day.
Server
The Server page charts open and running connections against the limit, statements by type, time waiting for row locks, buffer pool misses, temporary tables on disk and InnoDB's history list. Every figure is a rate over the seconds the snapshots cover, so a gap in collection does not draw a dip.
Transactions
Every collection reads the transactions that finished since the last one. The page charts committed against rolled back, with the share rolled back as its own line, and lists the long ones slowest first: how long each ran, whether it committed, its statements, and the account and program that ran it. Never their text.
Activity
Read live when opened, never stored. Blocking trees start from the session everyone waits for, and each open transaction lists the statements it has run, with the one that took the row locks marked. Running statements show what they wait on, and an ALTER TABLE how far it has got.
Daily digest
Cold and never-used indexes, an index a wider one makes redundant, a table growing twice as fast as usual, *_id columns no index starts with, tables without a primary key and reclaimable space. Each line links to its event, where it can be acknowledged or muted.
Statement digests need emulated prepares.
MySQL 8.0 gives no digest to statements sent as native prepared statements, which is what Laravel's
MySQL connection does by default. Index and table counters see every statement either way. For
digests of your application's queries, set
PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES to true on
the connection.
Why
The payment includes twelve months of upgrades, and what you receive in that year is yours permanently, whether or not you ever renew.
Secure checkout by Anystack, with cards and VAT invoices.
Sailfish is a Laravel package that keeps a long-term history of MySQL's performance_schema counters: index usage, full table scans, lock waits, errors, statement digests, finished transactions and the server's global status. It keeps that history across the server restarts that reset those counters, serves a dashboard of index, table and server activity, and sends events by mail, Slack or webhook when something changes. It is made by Boring Observability, who also make Skyline and Requizon.
performance_schema only ever tells you what happened since the server booted. After a restart or a failover, "this index has zero reads" means nothing, and you cannot ask whether scans on a table started after last Tuesday's deploy. Sailfish stores what moved in each five-minute interval, so those questions still have answers.
Eighteen, in three groups. On the server: connections running out, surges in row-lock waits, slow queries, errors and temporary tables on disk, a growing InnoDB history list, and buffer pool misses. On transactions: a surge in the share rolled back, and transactions that ran long. On tables and indexes: table-scan surges, indexes that went cold, were never used or are redundant, unusual table growth, unindexed *_id columns, tables without a primary key, reclaimable space and schema changes. The urgent ones are sent as they open; the rest go in a daily digest.
Yes. An index with no fetch in 30 days of observed history opens a "never used" event, which says how big the index is, what its writes cost and whether another index covers it. An index that was read in the 14 days before the last 7 and not since opens an "index went cold" event. PRIMARY keys are left out of both.
No. It is a package running inside your application. It reads performance_schema over your own connection, writes to sailfish_* tables in your own database and serves its dashboard from your own domain. Notifications go only to the mail addresses, Slack channel and webhook you configure.
MySQL 8.0, Laravel 12 or 13 and PHP 8.4 or newer, and a database user that can SELECT from performance_schema. An application user limited to its own schema cannot, and sailfish:collect names the grant it needs. SELECT on mysql.innodb_index_stats adds index sizes, and PROCESS adds InnoDB's history list length. Both are optional.
Sailfish is a one-time purchase of $99 per application. The purchase includes twelve months of upgrades. Everything published during those twelve months is yours permanently: you can keep running it and reinstall it whenever you rebuild. Renewing is optional and buys only the next year of releases. The checkout is hosted by Anystack, which also issues the license key.
Yes. Every purchase comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Email tech@boring-observability.dev within 30 days of being charged and we refund it in full, with no questions asked.
MySQL 8.0 gives no digest to statements sent through the binary prepared-statement protocol, and Laravel's MySQL connection uses native prepared statements by default. Index and table counters see every statement either way. For digests of application queries, set PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES to true on the connection.
Whoever your viewSailfish gate allows. Outside the local environment nobody gets in until you publish the service provider and define that gate. A second gate, viewSailfishQueryText, decides who sees running statements with their values rather than with each literal replaced by "?".
The cold and never-used index checks need weeks of history before they can say anything, and that clock starts with the first snapshot. Checkout ends with your license key.
Secure checkout by Anystack. 30 days to change your mind.
Questions first? Email us and one of the people who builds it will answer.