We are stoked to introduce the latest addition to our software lineup: Akeeba Panopticon, our self-hosted, free-of-charge site monitoring software for Joomla!™ sites!
Akeeba Panopticon can run on any commercial hosting provider which meets the following modest requirements:
- PHP 8.1, 8.2, or 8.3; PHP 8.2 recommended.
- MySQL 5.7.9 or later, or MariaDB 10.3 or later; MySQL 8.0 recommended.
- Able to run CRON jobs, either command-line (preferred) or URLs with a frequency of once every minute.
Panopticon can monitor Joomla! 3, Joomla! 4, and Joomla! 5 sites running on PHP 7.2 or later.
Joomla! versions 3.9, 3.10, 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, and 5.0 are currently supported.
Top features
Everything at a glance
Everything at a glance
See all the vital information across all your sites from one page:
- Joomla! version, and update availability
- Template overrides to check
- Extensions which need to be updated
- PHP version, and whether it needs to be updated
- Connectivity issues
Akeeba Panopticon is currently compatible with Joomla! 3, Joomla! 4, and Joomla! 5 (namely versions 3.9, 3.10, 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, and 5.0), PHP 7.2 to 8.3 inclusive.
You need to install a small extension, called a “connector”, to let Panopticon talk to your site. The Joomla! 3 connector implements its own API. The Joomla! 4 and 5 connector uses the Joomla! API application.
Accessible throughout
Accessible throughout
What good is software if it's not accessible to everyone?
And we really mean everyone.
Like all our software, we put extra effort into implementing accessibility (a11y) throughout the interface.
- Screen reader-friendly markup.
- Tweaked color contrast* for users with reduced visual acuity.
- Keyboard navigable.
- Light and dark mode, respecting browser settings.
- Respects reduced motion preferences
* We plan to overhaul our brand colour palette to further improve colour contrast in 2024.
Joomla!™ update
Joomla!™ update
Find Joomla! updates and install them, manually or automatically, with rules you define, at a time that's most convenient for your site.
No more update timeouts! Panopticon tells Joomla! to use the fast, alternate, official download source.
After updating Joomla! or its extensions check out any template overrides which have changed and may need your attention.
Your site misbehaves? Schedule a refresh of Joomla's core files right from Panopticon.
Updates and core refreshes are discovered and applied by Joomla! itself. Template override information is provided by Joomla! itself.
PHP sentinel
PHP sentinel
Every PHP version family is officially only fully supported for 2 years, and gets another year of security updates.
Keeping PHP up-to-date makes your site faster, more secure, and compatible with newer versions of Joomla! and its extensions.
Panopticon will let you know if your PHP version needs attention, and up to when it's supported so you can plan its update at your own pace.
The PHP version information is provided by EndOfLife.date, a third party site.
Extensions update
Extensions update
View all extensions installed on your site along with their version.
Install new extension versions manually, or automatically, using rules you can define per extension, globally or per site.
Manage and change your extension Download Keys from within Panopticon itself.
Find extensions with problematic updates, or missing update sites easily.
Extension information provided by Joomla!. Extension updates are installed by Joomla!.
Backup automation
Backup automation
Schedule automatic backups of your site, with an unlimited number of backup schedules per site.
Run the backups when you want them to run, not when it's most convenient for some third party service's load balancing.
View your latest backups and perform basic backup management operations.
Requires Akeeba Backup Professional, available with a paid subscription, installed on your site. Uses the publicly documented Akeeba Backup JSON API.
Security automation
Security automation
Easily regain access to your site if you're accidentally locked out.
Backend login URL is fully aware of the Administrator Secret URL Parameter and includes it, making it easier for your clients to log into their site.
Schedule execution of the PHP File Change Scanner on your site and view the latest site scan overview, with quick deep links into your site to view the full scan report.
Requires Admin Tools Professional, available with a paid subscription, installed on your site. Not available in Joomla! versions 4.0, 4.1, and 4.2.
Invite your clients
Invite your clients
User groups allow you to give limited access to specific sites, letting you invite your clients to monitor their sites, but not take any dangerous actions.
You can even have user groups which are allowed to set up and administer their own sites, but not view or interact with anyone else's sites.
But, wait, there's more!
White-label and extend
You can override every display aspect: language overrides, HTML overrides, CSS overrides, or an entirely new template which fits your brand.
Not satisfied with what Panopticon does? You can override its code, or write entirely new, bespoke features. Under the hood it uses Akeeba Web Framework (AWF), the same framework we're using for Akeeba Backup for WordPress and Akeeba Solo.
Free and FOSS
Panopticon is free of charge. There are no per–site or per–user costs to consider.
Panopticon is released under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 of the license, or (at your option) any later version. This is a deliberate choice, to prevent us or anyone else from turning Panopticon into yet another site monitoring service, as it's happened in the past with similar self-hosted solutions.
Being Free and Open Source Software also means that it's open for collaboration. We welcome your participation in our GitHub repository. Just keep in mind that not all issues, feature requests, and Pull Requests can be addressed in a timely manner, and there's no guarantee they will be accepted. We will welcome any help offered to that end.
Web and CLI
You can install Panopticon like any other web application, e.g. Joomla: extract its files, point a browser to the domain, and use the web installer.
You can also install it using Docker.
For a more advanced setup, you can deploy using Git or Composer and complete the installation with CLI commands.
Panopticon has its own CLI application. Its commands let you manage it without using a web browser. Most importantly, you can use them with automation tools such as Ansible. Together with our other CLI tools, such as UNiTE and RemoteCLI, we offer the building blocks for a fully automated site deployment and monitoring infrastructure for your company at a minimal cost.
The implementation of CLI commands is still a work-in-progress. We expect Panopticon to be fully CLI accessible by Q3 2024.
Some closing thoughts
Akeeba Panopticon is not meant to replace site monitoring services for all users. That's not its reason of existence.
Panopticon gives you freedom of choice by providing a self-hosted site monitoring solution which can be installed and maintained by non-experts on commodity web hosting.
If you needed site monitoring you had no choice but to use a third party service with everything that entails about cost, data sovereignty, customisation, client involvement, and vendor lock-in. Now, you have a viable alternative, and you can test it without having to spend a fortune.
As a direct result of its primary objective, Panopticon is not architectured like a service — not because we don't know how to, but because doing so would make it non-viable as a choice for the majority of the target audience. Keep that in mind when evaluating the architecture, especially the queue implementation.
Finally, let's talk about the elephant in the room: WordPress. Support for it is on the roadmap, but don't think it will happen too soon. First we will improve and polish what we already have for Joomla!, then we will expand it to support a new CMS.
Special Thank-You
We'd like to thank and acknowledge our gratitude gratitude to our friend and Joomla! co-founder Brian Teeman for his relentless beta testing and valuable contributions to the English language files of Akeeba Panopticon.