- What is nivseb/lara-monitor and what does it do for a Laravel app?
- Lara Monitor is a lightweight application performance monitoring package for Laravel that records spans (traces) and reports them to Elastic APM. It hooks into the framework through a service provider, middleware and event listeners, so request, job and command activity becomes visible without custom instrumentation code. The goal is early visibility into slow endpoints and failing flows rather than full observability platform replacement.
- How do I install nivseb/lara-monitor in a Laravel project?
- Install it with Composer, publish the package configuration, and set the relevant environment variables such as your Elastic APM endpoint and service name. Integration is described as low effort, and the span-limiting options are opt-in, so you can start recording spans first and enable limits later. After publishing config, clear any cached configuration before testing that traces arrive in your APM backend.
- Which Laravel and PHP versions does lara-monitor support?
- Version 1.2.0 widened compatibility to Laravel 13 and PHP 8.5, alongside earlier supported Laravel and PHP releases, so it fits both recently upgraded and greenfield applications. PHP 8.5 is very new, so confirm your deployment environment and other Composer dependencies also support it before upgrading. If you are on Laravel 13, check transitive dependencies such as the OpenTelemetry SDK and any other Laravel packages for compatibility.
- How does the span-limiting feature work and how should I configure it?
- Span limiting is an opt-in feature added in v1.2.0 that lets you cap telemetry volume and control the overhead the agent adds per request. It is configured through the published config file or environment variables rather than being enabled by default, so existing installs keep their previous behaviour. Start with a conservative, high limit in staging, measure dropped-span rates and latency, then tighten the limit per route or job once you know real traffic patterns.
- Will lara-monitor slow down my Laravel application in production?
- Any tracing agent adds some overhead, and Lara Monitor is designed to stay lightweight, with span limiting available specifically to keep telemetry volume and per-request cost under control. Baseline the overhead in a non-production environment with representative traffic before enabling it broadly. Then canary a small percentage of production traffic and compare latency and error rates against your pre-install baseline.
- Can I use lara-monitor together with Laravel Telescope, Horizon or Pulse?
- Yes, the package works alongside standard Laravel observability tooling such as Telescope, Horizon and Pulse without conflicting at the framework level. There is functional overlap, however, so decide which tool is authoritative for traces, metrics and queue insights to avoid duplicate data and double instrumentation cost. Many teams keep Telescope for local debugging and use the APM agent for production tracing.
- Does lara-monitor support distributed tracing and W3C trace context propagation across services?
- The package records spans at the Laravel framework level, which covers monoliths, modular monoliths and Laravel-based microservices. Explicit support for W3C traceparent propagation between services is not documented in the overview material, so verify it against the underlying tracing backend and the emitted span format before relying on it for cross-service traces. If you already run an OpenTelemetry exporter, treat Lara Monitor as complementary rather than a replacement.
- How do I disable lara-monitor or keep it out of local and testing environments?
- Because configuration is environment-variable driven, the usual approach is to enable the agent only where you need telemetry, for example staging and production, and leave it off in local and CI environments. Confirm the exact toggle keys in the published config file for your installed version before rolling out. For tests, assert that your app boots and that spans are recorded or skipped as expected rather than depending on a live APM server.
- Is lara-monitor actively maintained and safe to adopt for a production Laravel app?
- The package is actively maintained, with recent commits, dependency upgrades and a test suite modernised to Pest 4, and v1.2.0 is a minor release with no documented breaking changes. Overall technical risk is assessed as moderate to low for a minor upgrade, provided you validate span limiting under realistic load. Check the repository for release cadence, open issues and a security disclosure process before standardising on it.
- What are the alternatives to lara-monitor for monitoring a Laravel application?
- Common alternatives include the OpenTelemetry PHP SDK with Laravel instrumentation, hosted APM services, and Laravel's own first-party tools such as Telescope, Pulse and Horizon for queue and performance insight. Lara Monitor is a good fit if your organisation already standardises on Elastic APM and you want a small, Laravel-native agent rather than a general-purpose SDK. If you need vendor-neutral telemetry or advanced sampling strategies, compare it against an OpenTelemetry-based setup first.