Laravel Pulse

Learn how to install and configure Laravel Pulse for real-time application monitoring. Covers recorders, sampling, dashboard customization, and custom cards.

What is Laravel Pulse

Laravel Pulse delivers at-a-glance insights into your application’s performance and usage. With Pulse, you can track down bottlenecks like slow jobs and endpoints, find your most active users, and more.

Pulse vs Telescope

Feature	Laravel Pulse	Laravel Telescope
Purpose	Aggregate trends and metrics across the whole app	Deep debugging of individual requests and events
Data	Pre-aggregated metrics	Per-event logs
Best for	Production monitoring	Development and staging debugging

For in-depth debugging of individual events, check out Laravel Telescope.

Data flow

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Installation

Pulse’s first-party storage implementation requires a MySQL, MariaDB, or PostgreSQL database. If you are using a different database engine, you will need a separate MySQL, MariaDB, or PostgreSQL database for your Pulse data.

1. Install the package

   Install Pulse via Composer.

   composer require laravel/pulse
   
2. Publish configuration and migrations

   Publish the Pulse service provider assets.

   php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Laravel\Pulse\PulseServiceProvider"
   
3. Run migrations

   Create the tables needed to store Pulse data.

   php artisan migrate
   

Once migrations have run, access the Pulse dashboard at the /pulse route.

Publishing the configuration file

You can publish the configuration file separately to customize recorders and advanced options.

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=pulse-config

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Dashboard access

Authorization

By default, the Pulse dashboard is only accessible in the local environment. For production, configure the viewPulse authorization gate in your AppServiceProvider.

use App\Models\User;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Gate;

/**
 * Bootstrap any application services.
 */
public function boot(): void
{
    Gate::define('viewPulse', function (User $user) {
        return $user->isAdmin();
    });
}

Customizing the dashboard

Publish the dashboard view to customize cards and layout.

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=pulse-dashboard

The published file is at resources/views/vendor/pulse/dashboard.blade.php. The dashboard is powered by Livewire, so no JavaScript rebuild is required for customization.

{{-- Span the full screen width --}}
<x-pulse full-width>
    ...
</x-pulse>

{{-- Change the column count --}}
<x-pulse cols="16">
    ...
</x-pulse>

Control each card’s size and position with cols and rows props.

<livewire:pulse.usage cols="4" rows="2" />
<livewire:pulse.slow-queries expand />

---

Recorders

Recorders capture entries from your application and write them to the Pulse database. Configure them in the recorders section of config/pulse.php.

Requests and slow requests

The Requests recorder captures information about incoming requests. Configure the slow route threshold (default: 1000ms), sample rate, and ignored paths.

Recorders\SlowRequests::class => [
    // ...
    'threshold' => [
        '#^/admin/#' => 5000,
        'default' => env('PULSE_SLOW_REQUESTS_THRESHOLD', 1000),
    ],
],

Slow jobs

The SlowJobs recorder captures jobs that exceed the configured threshold (default: 1000ms). You can set per-job thresholds using regular expressions.

Recorders\SlowJobs::class => [
    // ...
    'threshold' => [
        '#^App\\Jobs\\GenerateYearlyReports$#' => 5000,
        'default' => env('PULSE_SLOW_JOBS_THRESHOLD', 1000),
    ],
],

Exceptions

The Exceptions recorder captures reportable exceptions occurring in your application. Exceptions are grouped by class and the location where they occurred.

Cache

The CacheInteractions recorder captures cache hits and misses. You can normalize similar keys into groups using regular expressions.

Recorders\CacheInteractions::class => [
    // ...
    'groups' => [
        '/:\d+/' => ':*',
    ],
],

Queues

The Queues recorder tracks queue throughput: queued, processing, processed, released, and failed jobs.

Servers

The Servers recorder captures CPU, memory, and storage usage of your servers. You must run the pulse:check command on each server you want to monitor.

php artisan pulse:check

By default, Pulse uses PHP’s gethostname() as the server name. Override it with an environment variable.

PULSE_SERVER_NAME=load-balancer

Users

The UserRequests and UserJobs recorders capture which users are making requests and dispatching jobs. This data appears in the Application Usage card.

Redis ingest

For high-traffic applications, you can send entries to a Redis stream and process them asynchronously.

PULSE_INGEST_DRIVER=redis

When using Redis ingest, run the pulse:work command to move entries from Redis into the database.

php artisan pulse:work

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Sampling

For high-traffic applications, capturing every event can result in millions of database rows. Enable sampling to record only a fraction of events. The dashboard scales values up and marks approximations with ~.

// config/pulse.php
Recorders\UserRequests::class => [
    'sample_rate' => 0.1, // record ~10% of requests
],

The more entries you have for a metric, the lower you can set the sample rate while maintaining accuracy.

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Environment variables

Key configuration values can be set via environment variables.

Variable	Description	Default
PULSE_ENABLED	Enable or disable Pulse	true
PULSE_DB_CONNECTION	Database connection for Pulse data	App default
PULSE_INGEST_DRIVER	Ingest driver (redis, etc.)	storage
PULSE_SERVER_NAME	Server display name	gethostname() value
PULSE_SLOW_REQUESTS_THRESHOLD	Slow request threshold (ms)	1000
PULSE_SLOW_JOBS_THRESHOLD	Slow job threshold (ms)	1000
PULSE_SLOW_QUERIES_THRESHOLD	Slow query threshold (ms)	1000

---

Custom cards

You can build custom Pulse cards to display data specific to your application. Cards are implemented as Livewire components.

namespace App\Livewire\Pulse;

use Laravel\Pulse\Livewire\Card;
use Livewire\Attributes\Lazy;

#[Lazy]
class TopSellers extends Card
{
    public function render()
    {
        return view('livewire.pulse.top-sellers');
    }
}

Use Pulse’s Blade components in your card view for a consistent look and feel.

<x-pulse::card :cols="$cols" :rows="$rows" :class="$class" wire:poll.5s="">
    <x-pulse::card-header name="Top Sellers">
        <x-slot:icon>
            ...
        </x-slot:icon>
    </x-pulse::card-header>

    <x-pulse::scroll :expand="$expand">
        ...
    </x-pulse::scroll>
</x-pulse::card>

Capture custom data with the Pulse::record method.

use Laravel\Pulse\Facades\Pulse;

Pulse::record('user_sale', $user->id, $sale->amount)
    ->sum()
    ->count();

Once your component and template are defined, include the card in your dashboard view.

<x-pulse>
    ...
    <livewire:pulse.top-sellers cols="4" />
</x-pulse>

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Summary

Goal	How
Install Pulse	composer require laravel/pulse
Access the dashboard	/pulse route
Restrict access in production	Define the viewPulse gate
Enable server monitoring	Run php artisan pulse:check as a daemon
Reduce database load	Set sample_rate on recorders

Next steps

Error handling

Learn how Laravel handles and reports exceptions.

Logging

Configure and use Laravel’s logging system.