Laravel Real-Time Monitoring Using Inspector

Hi, I'm Valerio, software engineer from Italy.

As product owner I learned on my skin how an application issue isn't just a technical stuff. For software-driven companies performance bottlenecks and bugs could create a negative impact on the users experience and can affect their perception about our product and work.

Users don't spend their time to report bugs, they just stop using our application, moving to another one that fits their needs better.

I'm one of those that publish new code changes almost every day and unfortunately it's quite impossible to anticipate all the problems that could happen after every release.

In most of the projects I've worked on the 50% of the drawbacks for users were caused by simple code mistakes, often in the code executed in background (artisan commands or Jobs) where it's even more tricky to know if all is working fine or something is broken.

Inspector is a composer package to add real-time monitoring in Laravel applications, it's very easy to install and use, and it takes just two minutes to get started.

Thanks to Inspector you'll no longer need to spend a lot of time to monitor your application behaviour by logs manually, because an autonomous tool does this job for you 24/7, making it rise to the surface anything that could create problems for users.

Let me show you how it works.

Install the composer package

Install our package by running the command below in your terminal:

composer require inspector-apm/inspector-laravel

Configure the API key

Get a fresh API key by signing up for Inspector (https://app.inspector.dev/register) and creating a new application, it takes just a few seconds. 

You'll see installation instructions directly in the app screen:

Put the API key into your environment file:

INSPECTOR_API_KEY=13c37c434XXXXXXXXXXXX

Test everything is working:

Execute our test command to check if your app send data to inspector correctly:

php artisan inspector:test

Go to https://app.inspector.dev/home to explore your demo data.

By default Inspector monitors:

• Database interactions
• Queued Jobs
• Artisan commands
• Email sent
• Notifications
• Unhandled Exceptions

We just turned on the light in the 50% of our app executed in background. The next step is to monitor all transactions generated by user interactions.

Incoming Web Requests monitoring

To activate monitoring also when your app is executed due to an incoming http request you can use the WebRequestMonitoring middleware.

It works like any other Laravel middleware you are familiar to so you are free to decide which routes need to be monitored based on your routes configuration or on your personal monitoring preferences.

The most easy way to cover all your application routes is attaching the middleware in the 

App\Http\Kernel

<?php

/**
 * The application's route middleware groups.
 *
 * @var  array
 */
protected $middlewareGroups = [
    'web' => [
        ...,
        \Inspector\Laravel\Middleware\WebRequestMonitoring::class,
    ],
    

    'api' => [
        ...,
        \Inspector\Laravel\Middleware\WebRequestMonitoring::class,
    ]
]

Instantly you will see transactions streams in your project’s dashboard:

and for each transaction you can monitor what your application is executing in real-time:

Enrich your timeline

Inspector monitors database query, background jobs, artisan commands by default, but could be many critical statements in your code that need to be monitored in terms of performance and error:

• Http calls to external services (Data sync, Payment, etc)
• Function that deals with files (pdf, excel, images)
• Algorithms

Thanks to our package you can add custom segments in your timeline in addition to those detected by default, to measure the impact that an hidden code block has on a transaction’s performance.

Let me show you a real life example.

Suppose you have a queued job that executes some database checks and an http request to an external service in background.

Job and queries are reported automatically, but it could be interesting to monitor and measure the execution of the http request. Simply use the inspector helper function:

<?php


class TagUserAsActive extends Job
{
    /**
     * @param User $user
     */
    protected $user;

    /**
     * Monitoring & Measure an external http request
     */
    public function handle()
    {
        // Start monitoring
        inspector()->addSegment(function () {
                
            $this->guzzle->post('[mail-marketing-url]/add_tag', [
                'email' => $htis->user->email,
                'tag' => 'active',
            ]);
                
        }, 'http');
    }
}

You will see the impact of the new segment in your timeline:

Exceptions Alerting

By default, every unhandled exception fired in your Laravel app will be reported automatically to be sure you’re alerted for unpredictable errors in real time.

I wish that every change I make to my code could be perfect. But the reality is, this is not always the case. Some errors appear immediately after an update, while others pop up unpredictably.

However, Inspector automates the detection of unknown issues so I no longer need to manually check the status of my apps continuously or wait reports directly from users. If something goes wrong I’ll receive a notification in real time, and after each release I can stay informed about the impact of the latest code refactor.

If your code fires an exception but you don't want to block the execution, you can report the error to inspector manually for private monitoring about availability of the external system.

<?php

try {
	
	// Your dangerous http call here...
	
} catch (\Exception $exception) {
    // Report an exception intentionally to collect diagnostics data
	Inspector::reportException($exception)
}

Furthermore, if the http request fails, you will be alerted in real time in your inbox to take a look at the error as it appears.

Real-Time email notification

You even get access to detailed information gathered by Inspector in real time:

Conclusion

When a customer reports to you that something isn't working, it forces you to drop whatever you are doing and start trying to reproduce the scenario, then recapture and reanalyze the logs in your own toolset.

Getting a true picture of what's happening can require hours or, based on my experience, even days. Inspector can make a huge difference in terms of efficiency and productivity.

By delegating application monitoring to an automous tool, allows you to solve 90% of the problems in the half the time, before users even know about them.

Previously published at https://inspector.dev/laravel-real-time-performance-monitoring-using-inspector-part-1/