5: Monitoring: WhatsApp and visitors

Two of the Dashboard's modules are about watching things in production.

5.1: WhatsApp monitoring

The WhatsApp module discovers the Phlo WhatsApp gateways running on the fleet and reports their state: linked or not, online or offline, and the login QR when a gateway needs re-pairing. It is the operational companion to the Phlo WhatsApp manual: Phlo WhatsApp tells you how to send and receive, the Dashboard tells you whether the gateway behind it is healthy.

5.2: Visitor analytics

The Visitors module is privacy-friendly analytics built into the platform: page views, visitor counts and real engagement time without third-party trackers, stored in your own database. The heartbeat behind it measures active (tab-visible) time per visitor and per page, so the module shows not just who came and what they viewed but how long they actually stayed on each page. Because it is part of the fleet, you get this for every managed app in one place.

The location column (country, city, ISP) comes from a one-time geo lookup per IP, cached in the lookup table so each address is resolved only once. On a cache miss the module calls ipgeolocation.io with the API key you set as a top-level ipgeolocation key in data/creds.ini, then writes the result back to lookup. Without a key the analytics still work; the location column simply stays empty. The lookup is also skipped for empty, private or reserved IPs, so untracked visitors never trigger an API call or a wrong location.

5.3: One control center

Put together, the Dashboard is the operations layer over everything the other manuals describe: the CMS for content, Phlo Realtime for realtime, Phlo WhatsApp for messaging. The apps stay small and stateless; the Dashboard is where you run, watch and secure them.