Laravel Pulse: Real-Time Application Monitoring

Real-Time Insights

Laravel Pulse provides a beautiful, real-time dashboard for monitoring your application's health and performance. Unlike traditional APM tools, Pulse is built specifically for Laravel and understands its conventions.

Installation

composer require laravel/pulse
php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Laravel\Pulse\PulseServiceProvider"
php artisan migrate

What Pulse Monitors

• Slow requests and queries
• Application usage patterns
• Queue throughput and failures
• Cache hit/miss rates
• Exception frequency
• Server resource usage

Accessing the Dashboard

// In routes/web.php
Route::middleware(['auth', 'can:viewPulse'])->prefix('pulse')->group(function () {
    Route::get('/', function () {
        return view('pulse::dashboard');
    });
});

// Authorization
Gate::define('viewPulse', function (User $user) {
    return $user->isAdmin();
});

Custom Cards

class TopProductsCard extends Card
{
    public function render(): View
    {
        $products = DB::table('order_items')
            ->select('product_id', DB::raw('SUM(quantity) as total'))
            ->groupBy('product_id')
            ->orderByDesc('total')
            ->limit(10)
            ->get();

        return view('pulse.cards.top-products', [
            'products' => $products,
        ]);
    }
}

Sampling Configuration

// config/pulse.php
'sample_rate' => env('PULSE_SAMPLE_RATE', 1),  // 1 = 100%

// Reduce storage for high-traffic apps
'storage' => [
    'trim' => [
        'lottery' => [1, 1000],  // 1 in 1000 requests triggers trim
        'keep' => '7 days',
    ],
],

Performance Considerations

Pulse uses minimal resources but can be tuned for high-traffic applications:

• Adjust sample rate for less granular but lower-overhead monitoring
• Use Redis for better performance
• Configure data retention periods

Conclusion

Pulse brings first-party monitoring to Laravel with zero configuration. Install it on every Laravel application you build.