Laravel Telescope

Learn how to install Laravel Telescope, from a local-only installation to configuring watchers.

What is Laravel Telescope

Laravel Telescope is the official debugging tool that visualizes the internal state of your Laravel application. It records detailed information about requests, exceptions, queries, jobs, logs, mail, notifications, cache operations, and scheduled runs.

It’s a debugging tool intended for local development environments only. For monitoring in production, use Laravel Pulse or Laravel Nightwatch.

The layers being monitored

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Installation

1. Install Telescope

   composer require laravel/telescope
   
2. Publish the assets and migrations

   php artisan telescope:install
   
3. Run the migrations

   php artisan migrate
   

After installation, you can access the dashboard at /telescope.

Local-only installation (recommended)

If your primary goal is debugging during local development, we recommend installing with --dev and manually registering the service provider only in the local environment.

composer require laravel/telescope --dev

php artisan telescope:install
php artisan migrate

After running telescope:install, remove the TelescopeServiceProvider registration from bootstrap/providers.php. Then register it manually in the register method of App\Providers\AppServiceProvider.

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(TelescopeServiceProvider::class);
    }
}

Also disable auto-discovery in composer.json.

{
  "extra": {
    "laravel": {
      "dont-discover": [
        "laravel/telescope"
      ]
    }
  }
}

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Available watchers

Watchers collect telemetry when requests or commands run. Manage their enablement and configuration in config/telescope.php.

Request Watcher

Records requests, headers, session, and responses.
You can limit the recorded response size with size_limit.

Query Watcher (particularly important)

Records SQL, bindings, and execution time.
By default, queries exceeding 100ms are tagged with slow, making it very effective for detecting performance bottlenecks.

Watchers\QueryWatcher::class => [
    'enabled' => env('TELESCOPE_QUERY_WATCHER', true),
    'slow' => 100,
],

Job Watcher

Records queue job dispatches and their execution results.

Exception Watcher

Records reportable exceptions and their stack traces.

Log Watcher

Records application logs.
The default level is error and above, and it can be lowered to debug in the configuration.

Command Watcher

Records Artisan command arguments, options, output, and exit codes.

Event Watcher

Records the payloads and listener information of dispatched events (internal Laravel events are excluded).

Cache Watcher

Records cache hits, misses, updates, and deletions.

Redis Watcher

Records Redis commands executed from the application.

Model Watcher

Records Eloquent model events, and can also collect hydration counts if needed.

Notification Watcher

Records sent notifications.

Mail Watcher

Preview sent emails in the browser and download them as .eml.

HTTP Client Watcher

Records outbound HTTP client requests.

Gate Watcher

Records the results of Gate / Policy authorization checks.

Schedule Watcher

Records scheduled commands and their output.

View Watcher

Records the name, path, data, and composers of rendered views.

Batch Watcher

Records queue batch information (jobs and connection information).

Dump Watcher

Records dump output while Telescope’s Dump tab is open.

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Summary

Task	Recommended setup
Install	composer require laravel/telescope --dev
Reliable local-only isolation	Manual provider registration + dont-discover
DB performance investigation	Use the Query Watcher’s slow query tag (default 100ms)

Next steps

Laravel Pulse

Install a performance aggregation dashboard for production environments.

Laravel Nightwatch

Use Nightwatch for real-time monitoring of production environments.