What is Laravel Telescope?

Laravel Telescope is an official debugging and monitoring tool for the Laravel framework. It provides a real-time dashboard to monitor requests, exceptions, database queries, queued jobs, mail, notifications, cache operations, scheduled tasks, and more. Telescope is an essential companion for local development and fine-tuning production performance.

Local-Only Installation

To keep your production environment clean, install Telescope as a dev dependency:

composer require laravel/telescope --dev
php artisan telescope:install
php artisan migrate

Service Provider Configuration

Remove App\Providers\TelescopeServiceProvider from bootstrap/providers.php and register providers conditionally in App\Providers\AppServiceProvider.php:

public function register(): void
{
    if ($this->app->environment('local') && class_exists(\Laravel\Telescope\TelescopeServiceProvider::class)) {
        $this->app->register(\Laravel\Telescope\TelescopeServiceProvider::class);
        $this->app->register(\App\Providers\TelescopeServiceProvider::class);
    }
}

Data Pruning (Laravel)

To prevent the telescope_entries table from growing excessively, schedule pruning in routes/console.php:

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schedule;

Schedule::command('telescope:prune --hours=48')->daily();

Dashboard Authorization

By default, the Telescope dashboard is accessible only in the local environment. For production access, define an authorization gate in App\Providers\TelescopeServiceProvider.php:

protected function gate(): void
{
    Gate::define('viewTelescope', function (User $user) {
        return in_array($user->email, ['[email protected]']);
    });
}

Filtering Telescope Data

You can filter entries to prevent logging sensitive or unnecessary data in production:

Telescope::filter(function (IncomingEntry $entry) {
    if ($this->app->environment('local')) return true;

    return $entry->isReportableException() ||
           $entry->isFailedJob() ||
           $entry->isScheduledTask() ||
           $entry->isSlowQuery() ||
           $entry->hasMonitoredTag();
});

Watchers

Telescope provides multiple watchers to monitor different aspects of your application:

• CacheWatcher: Monitors cache operations.
• CommandWatcher: Logs Artisan commands.
• DumpWatcher: Records dump() outputs.
• EventWatcher: Monitors dispatched events.
• ExceptionWatcher: Records exceptions.
• GateWatcher: Monitors authorization checks.
• HTTPClientWatcher: Tracks outgoing HTTP requests.
• JobWatcher: Monitors queued jobs.
• LogWatcher: Logs application logs (configurable levels).
• MailWatcher: Previews sent emails.
• ModelWatcher: Tracks Eloquent model events.
• NotificationWatcher: Monitors notifications.
• QueryWatcher: Logs SQL queries, bindings, and slow queries.
• RedisWatcher: Monitors Redis commands (use with caution as it can impact performance).
• RequestWatcher: Logs request/response data.
• ScheduleWatcher: Tracks scheduled tasks.
• ViewWatcher: Records view rendering information.