Horizon Exporter Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Observability roadmap: Prioritize queue and background-job monitoring as a first-class reliability capability, especially for async workflows, scheduled jobs, and customer-facing SLAs.
• Build vs. buy: Adopt a small OSS exporter instead of building and maintaining a custom Prometheus integration for Laravel Horizon. This reduces engineering effort and keeps metrics aligned with standard monitoring tooling.
• Capacity planning and cost decisions: Use queue depth, throughput, failure, and wait-time metrics to justify worker scaling, infrastructure changes, and on-call staffing.
• Incident response and SLOs: Enable alerting on queue health so the team can detect backlog growth, job failures, and processing delays before users report them.
• Upgrade planning: The 2.0.0 release is tied to Laravel 9 support and drops Laravel 8.x. This makes the package relevant to Laravel 9 migration planning and creates a clear dependency for teams still on Laravel 8.
• Use cases: Production Laravel applications using Horizon, teams standardizing on Prometheus/Grafana, and organizations that need lightweight queue observability without a full APM replacement.

When to Consider This Package

Consider adoption when:

• The application uses Laravel Horizon for queue management.
• The team already uses, or plans to use, Prometheus and Grafana for metrics and alerting.
• The application is on Laravel 9 or later; 2.0.0 explicitly supports Laravel 9 and drops Laravel 8.x.
• There is a need for queue-level metrics such as job throughput, failures, wait times, and backlog visibility.
• The team prefers open-source, low-maintenance integrations over custom monitoring code.

Look elsewhere when:

• The application is on Laravel 8.x or older and cannot upgrade; 2.0.0 is not compatible.
• The application does not use Horizon, or queue metrics are already covered by an existing APM/vendor integration.
• The organization requires vendor-supported monitoring with SLAs rather than OSS.
• The team needs broad application performance monitoring, tracing, or business metrics beyond Horizon queue health.
• There is no Prometheus-compatible monitoring stack and no plan to adopt one.
• The application has minimal queue usage and the operational value does not justify additional monitoring complexity.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For executives: Adopting this package improves visibility into background job reliability and queue health, which directly affects customer experience and operational risk. It is a low-cost, open-source addition that supports Laravel 9 readiness, reduces the need to build custom monitoring, and helps the team detect and resolve queue incidents faster. The main constraint is that version 2.0.0 requires Laravel 9 and is not compatible with Laravel 8.x.

For engineering: This is a focused Prometheus exporter for Laravel Horizon. It gives standard queue metrics with minimal application code, fits naturally into a Prometheus/Grafana stack, and avoids maintaining a bespoke exporter. The 2.0.0 release is a breaking change for Laravel 8 users: teams must be on Laravel 9 before adopting it. For Laravel 9 teams already using Horizon, it is a low-effort observability win; for Laravel 8 teams, either upgrade Laravel first or defer adoption.