Telescope & V 9.0

Just in time for the beginning of spring in March we started the Meetup season 2022 with our two speakers Marcel Wege and Joshua Blum. The topics this time: Laravel Telescope and Laravel 9.0 including helpful tips for upgrading your own applications.

At the Laravel Meetup DACH in March, byte5 CTO Marcel started with the small but very useful package Laravel Telescope. This is a backend service with a clear dashboard, which is able to monitor vital values of the own Laravel application. If the site is already live or being tested and actively used, it can also be used to monitor the behavior of the users. Events that can be monitored using Telescope include:

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

• Cache requests
• Exceptions - Events
• HTTP requests
• Log entries
• Mail notifications
• Database queries

You can think of Telescope as a kind of central logbook. All information that can be viewed in the Laravel Debugbar , for example, is written centrally in Telescope and can be used for error analysis. Another advantage: There are various ways to anonymize and delete the data (see Telescope doc). All in all, Laravel Telescope is a good toolset for monitoring and optimizing your own data in live operation.

The installation is done Laravel-typically via Composer with laravel/telescope. Afterwards there is the possibility to modify Authorization Gates individually according to the application purpose. After logging in, you land on a dashboard, on which possible error sources are clearly listed. Further information, the corresponding source code, a ticket system as well as references to the same error in other places can also be displayed here.

A very helpful feature especially for integration work with external APIs is the overview of HTTP clients. This makes it clear which requests were made when using a specific HTTP. These can be displayed including header data and responses and compared with the expected behavior.

Also useful is the tracking of mails. Telescope determines whether mails were delivered via SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) or there were problems sending them. For this purpose, individual mails and related details are listed in the dashboard. It is also possible to display queries. Particularly in live operation, this quickly shows whether the Eloquent queries are running cleanly, are performing well or whether there is still scope for optimizing performance.

By the way: Telescope is compatible with Laravel 9.0, which brings us to the next topic of the Meetup.

After Joshua Blum was already a guest at the DACH Meetup 2021, this time he focused on the topic "What's new in Laravel 9 and best practices on upgrading your application". A recording of his talk is available in the video.

More info about Laravel 9.0 can be found here in the blog post.

As always, we would like to thank both speakers and the audience for the interesting insights and exciting discussions!