How to Monitor a Laravel Application End to End

Laravel is a powerful PHP framework with built-in tools for queues, scheduling, and caching. Each of these features introduces monitoring needs that go beyond checking if your homepage loads.

Laravel-Specific Monitoring Points

Queue Workers

Laravel queues process jobs in the background — emails, notifications, data processing. If a queue worker dies, jobs pile up silently.

Monitor with heartbeats: Have your queue worker ping a heartbeat URL after processing each batch. If the ping stops, the worker is down.

Scheduled Tasks

Laravel's task scheduler runs cron jobs defined in your application. A server reboot, a misconfigured crontab, or a PHP error can stop all scheduled tasks.

Monitor with heartbeats: Add a heartbeat ping to your most critical scheduled tasks.

Horizon Dashboard

If you use Laravel Horizon for queue management, monitor its health endpoint. Horizon can crash independently of your main application.

Database Connections

Laravel's connection pooling can exhaust available connections under load. Monitor your database port and track active connection counts.

Cache Health

Laravel heavily uses Redis or Memcached for caching, sessions, and queues. A cache failure cascades into slow responses and failed jobs.

The Laravel Monitoring Checklist

• HTTP monitor on main application URL (30-second intervals)
• HTTP monitor on API endpoints
• Heartbeat on primary queue worker
• Heartbeat on critical scheduled tasks (backups, reports)
• Port monitor on database (MySQL/PostgreSQL)
• Port monitor on Redis
• SSL certificate monitoring
• Horizon health endpoint (if using Horizon)

Environment-Specific Checks

.env Configuration

A missing or wrong .env value can break specific features while the app appears healthy. Monitor the features, not just the framework.

Storage Permissions

Laravel writes to storage/logs and storage/framework. Permission issues cause silent failures.

Session Driver

If sessions are stored in Redis and Redis fails, users get logged out and can't log back in.

Laravel gives you powerful tools. Make sure you can see when they stop working.