Laravel Telescope is a powerful debugging and monitoring tool provided by the Laravel framework. It offers real-time insights into the requests, database queries, cache operations, and other activities of your Laravel application. With Telescope, developers can quickly identify and resolve performance issues, debug errors, and gain a deeper understanding of their application's behavior. In this post, we'll explore Laravel Telescope and provide an example of how to set it up and use it in your Laravel project.

Prerequisites

Before getting started, ensure you have a Laravel project up and running. If you don't have Laravel installed, you can create a new project using Composer:

composer create-project laravel/laravel project-name
cd project-name

Installing Laravel Telescope

To install Laravel Telescope, use Composer:

composer require laravel/telescope --dev

Next, publish the Telescope assets and migration files:

php artisan telescope:install
php artisan migrate

Using Laravel Telescope

Once Telescope is installed and the migrations are run, you can access the Telescope dashboard by visiting /telescope in your application's URL.

Monitoring Requests and Jobs

Telescope provides a comprehensive view of the requests and jobs handled by your application. It captures detailed information, including request duration, response status, executed queries, and more. By navigating to the "Requests" tab in Telescope, you can inspect individual requests and see their related queries, log entries, and events.

Debugging with Telescope

Telescope simplifies the debugging process by capturing and displaying log entries, exceptions, and failed jobs in real-time. The "Exceptions" tab allows you to inspect the stack traces of thrown exceptions, making it easier to identify and resolve issues.

Inspecting Database Queries

Telescope offers an in-depth view of database queries, allowing you to analyze their execution time, SQL statements, and parameters. By navigating to the "Queries" tab, you can identify slow or repeated queries that may impact your application's performance.

Monitoring Cache and Redis Operations

Telescope provides insights into cache operations and Redis commands executed by your application. The "Cache" and "Redis" tabs display data on cache hits, misses, and durations, as well as the executed Redis commands.

Watching Telescope Live

Telescope's live mode provides a real-time monitoring experience, enabling you to observe your application's activities as they happen. By clicking the "Live" button on the top right corner of the Telescope dashboard, you can see requests, queries, and other actions as they occur in your application.

Customizing Telescope

Telescope can be customized to exclude certain sensitive data or to modify the data collection behavior. By editing the config/telescope.php file, you can configure the Telescope options according to your preferences.