Laravel Pulse

Laravel Pulse Monitoring Tool is a visually appealing dashboard tool for managing Laravel applications. It provides a simple and user-friendly interface for monitoring key metrics and events in your Laravel app. In this post, we’ll go over how to set up and use Laravel Pulse to monitor queues, schedules, cache, logs, and other items.

Understanding Laravel Pulse

What is Laravel Pulse?

Laravel Pulse is more than just a package; it’s a powerful, opinionated collection of tools and services meant to turbocharge your Laravel apps. Pulse, developed by Laravel’s founders, Taylor Otwell and his team, offers a streamlined experience for monitoring and maintaining your Laravel applications.

Key Components of Laravel Pulse

1. Real-time Monitoring: Pulse provides real-time insights into your application’s performance, allowing you to track database queries, HTTP requests, and other metrics.
2. Exception Tracking: Pulse’s exception tracking helps you quickly discover and handle issues. It collects and displays precise information about failures and exceptions, simplifying troubleshooting.
3. Task Scheduling Insights: Pulse can help you better comprehend your work schedule. Track scheduled tasks, detect bottlenecks, and improve application efficiency.
4. Job Metrics: If your application is based on queued jobs, Pulse offers granular data to help you monitor and optimize job execution.
5. Database Query Monitoring: Pulse goes beyond standard monitoring solutions, providing insights into your application’s database queries. Identify sluggish queries, potential optimizations, and ways to improve overall database performance.

Getting Started with Laravel Pulse

To install beta package releases for Pulse, update your application’s composer.json file.

"minimum-stability": "beta",
"prefer-stable": true

Require the Package:

composer require laravel/pulse

Pulse configuration:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Laravel\Pulse\PulseServiceProvider"

Migration:

php artisan migrate

Understanding the Pulse Dashboard

The Pulse dashboard puts all metrics into logical areas for easy navigation. Let’s go through them one by one.

Overview

The overview shows a snapshot of important metrics, like:

• Traffic: Number of requests
• Performance: Average response times
• Errors: Requests resulting in server errors
• Alerts: Failures and exceptions

This provides a nice high-level overview of application health. To learn more about a specific card, simply click it.

Traffic

The traffic section shows insights related to app requests:

• Top Endpoints: Most hit endpoints by request volume
• Requests: Total requests over time
• Throughput: Requests per minute
• Performance: Histogram showing response time distribution

This enables us to optimize slow endpoints and plan infrastructure for traffic changes.

Monitoring

Monitoring provides metrics for queues, scheduling, caching, and more.

Queues

• Queue backlog over time
• Jobs processed per minute
• Job retries and failures
• Breakdown of jobs by type

This helps prevent queues from piling up and debugs queue worker errors.

Schedules

• History of cron job runs
• Most frequent jobs
• Last run timestamps
• Failures and exceptions

No need to SSH and manually inspect – view the scheduled job history easily.

Cache

• Total cache hits and misses
• Cache write/delete operations
• Breakdown by cache driver (Redis, Memcached, etc.)

Cache lifetimes and size restrictions can be optimized using hard data.

Logs

• Application logs in real-time
• Search and filter capabilities
• Click any log to expand

No need to tail -f application logs!

Errors

Errors and exceptions must be addressed promptly in production. Pulse makes it easier with:

• List of all errors, including stack traces
• Times series graph of errors
• Filter by HTTP status (500 errors, etc.)
• Group by endpoint or exception type

Debug errors faster by consolidating all circumstances in one place.

Alerts

Pulse may warn your team when awful things happen using:

• Web notifications in the Pulse UI
• Email notifications
• Webhooks to communicate with other services

Some common triggers are:

• Application exceptions and errors
• Queue failures above the threshold
• Server warnings like high memory usage
• Custom app-specific events

Sleep tight with health notifications.

Custom Metrics

Pulse offers the possibility to establish business-specific metrics:

// Send purchase count metric 
pulse()->measure('purchases', Purchases::count());

// Tags for filtering
pulse()->measure('votes', Votes::count(), ['post_id' => $postId]);

Additional Features

Let’s have a look at some more notable features of Laravel Pulse.

Debug Mode

Activate debug mode to collect extra metrics with greater granularity but at a higher overhead. It is handy for profiling and debugging app bugs in staging and test environments.

API Access

Pulse allows API access to metrics data. This enables export to external tools. Supported options include Graphite, Prometheus, DataDog, InfluxDB, and more.

Audit Logs

The admin section records any changes made to Pulse for auditing purposes, including changes to the settings, alarms, users, and so on.

Multi-Tenancy

Pulse allows for convenient tenant-filtered views in SaaS systems with numerous tenants. This allows you to track the performance of consumers.

Environments

Pulse allows you to easily switch between multiple settings, such as staging and production. You can make specific environments read-only for added security.

Leveraging Pulse for Efficient Development

Continuous Performance Improvement

With Pulse, performance optimization becomes a continuous, data-driven process. Identify trends, establish performance standards, and continuously fine-tune your application to ensure maximum responsiveness.

Collaborative Development with Pulse

For development teams, Pulse serves as a collaborative tool for understanding and optimizing application performance. Share insights, establish performance goals, and collaborate to provide a smooth user experience.

Best Practices for Laravel Pulse

Regular Monitoring and Analysis

To properly utilize Pulse, make monitoring and analysis a regular component of your development process. Review metrics on a regular basis to spot patterns and fix any performance concerns before they arise.

Customization for Your Application’s Needs

While Pulse has opinionated defaults, make use of its customization possibilities. Customize Pulse to meet your application’s specific needs, ensuring you receive the most relevant information.

Stay Informed with Pulse Notifications

Configure Pulse notifications to stay updated on crucial events in your application. Whether there is an unusually high number of exceptions or a sudden increase in database queries, timely notifications allow you to respond proactively.

Conclusion

To summarize, Laravel Pulse gives crucial visibility into application data via an easy-to-use dashboard. The ability to track requests, queues, cache, logs, and other metrics in one location simplifies app health monitoring.

Pulse is a Swiss Army knife for Laravel developers, thanks to its easy alerting, customizable metrics, and multi-environment support. The teams behind Laravel and Forge are world-class, so you can rely on their experience in developing such a high-quality solution.

If your company uses a Laravel app, Pulse is one of the best investments you can make. The time saved from debugging bugs, along with the application optimization insights, pays for itself rapidly.

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