Laravel Easy Metrics Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Build vs. Buy: Buy for rapid dashboard development, avoiding custom charting logic. Reduces engineering effort by 60-80% for standard metrics (e.g., user counts, revenue trends).
• Roadmap Priorities:
  • Analytics Dashboards: Accelerate delivery of Filament-powered dashboards (e.g., SaaS metrics, CRM analytics) with pre-built chart types (line, doughnut, bar).
  • Product Analytics: Enable non-engineers to self-serve metrics (e.g., "show me monthly active users by region") via admin panels.
  • Growth Tracking: Standardize growth rate calculations (e.g., MoM/YoY) across products, ensuring consistency in reporting.
• Use Cases:
  • Internal Tools: Replace ad-hoc SQL queries in admin panels with reusable, maintainable metrics.
  • Customer Portals: Embed lightweight charts in B2B dashboards (e.g., "Your usage this month vs. last month").
  • Data-Driven Features: Power feature flags or A/B tests with real-time metrics (e.g., "conversion rate for feature X").
• Tech Debt Reduction: Eliminates duplicated charting logic across microservices or monoliths by centralizing metric generation.

When to Consider This Package

Adopt if:

• Your stack is Laravel 10.x + PHP 8.0 with Eloquent models (or minimal customization needed for other DBs).
• You need 6+ chart types (value, line, doughnut, pie, polar, bar, trend) with zero frontend JS (data is pre-processed server-side).
• Your team lacks dedicated data engineers but requires self-service analytics for non-technical stakeholders.
• You’re using Filament v3 and want to add charts to widgets with <10 lines of code.
• Growth metrics (e.g., MoM %, YoY $) are critical but currently require manual calculations or external tools (e.g., Mixpanel).
• You prioritize developer velocity over customization (e.g., 80% of use cases fit out-of-the-box).

Look elsewhere if:

• You need real-time streaming metrics (this package is query-based, not event-driven).
• Your data lives in non-SQL sources (e.g., Kafka, GraphQL APIs) without Eloquent models.
• You require complex statistical analysis (e.g., regression, clustering) beyond aggregates (sum, avg, count).
• Your team has dedicated BI tools (e.g., Metabase, Power BI) and this would duplicate effort.
• You need sub-second latency for high-cardinality time-series (e.g., 10K+ data points); consider caching strategies or dedicated time-series DBs.
• Your project uses Laravel <9.x or PHP <8.0 (compatibility not guaranteed).

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For Executives: *"This package lets us build data-driven dashboards 10x faster by eliminating manual charting code. For example, a Filament widget showing ‘Monthly Active Users’—which today takes a backend dev 2–4 hours to build—can now be implemented in 15 minutes with this tool. It’s like hiring a junior data analyst for every product team, but without the headcount. We’ll use it to:

• Launch customer analytics portals in Q3 (reducing reliance on external tools like Mixpanel).
• Cut dashboard development time by 70% for internal tools (e.g., sales ops, support).
• Standardize growth metrics across products, ensuring consistency in reports to leadership. The MIT license and active maintenance mean no vendor lock-in, and the Filament integration aligns with our tech stack."*

For Engineering Leaders: *"This is a force multiplier for our backend team. It turns repetitive tasks—like building ‘users by region’ charts or ‘revenue trends’—into reusable components. Key benefits:

• Reduces tech debt: No more duplicated charting logic across services.
• Enables non-engineers: Product managers can now request ‘show me X vs. Y’ without filing Jira tickets.
• Performance: Optimized for Laravel’s query builder; we can add caching later if needed.
• Future-proof: Works with Filament’s widget system, so as we adopt more admin panels, this scales. Tradeoff: We’ll need to validate edge cases (e.g., time zones, large datasets) in our CI, but the risk is low—it’s a thin abstraction over Eloquent. Let’s pilot it on the [Product Analytics Dashboard] and measure dev time saved."*

For Developers: *"This package solves the ‘charting hell’ we face when someone asks for ‘a quick graph.’ Here’s how it works:

1. Install: composer require sakanjo/laravel-easy-metrics.
2. Use: Replace this:

   // Old way (error-prone, duplicated)
   DB::table('users')->where('created_at', '>=', now()->subDays(30))->count();
   

   With this:

   // New way (reusable, typed)
   Trend::make(User::class)->countByDays();
   

3. Extend: Need a custom chart? Inherit from Trend or Doughnut and add your logic. Why it’s better:

• No frontend JS: Charts are data-only; your existing Filament/Chart.js setup works.
• Growth rates built-in: Get MoM % with ->withGrowthRate().
• Works with Filament: Drop into widgets like this:

  class UsersChart extends ChartWidget {
      public function getData() {
          [$labels, $data] = Trend::make(User::class)->countByMonths();
          return ['labels' => $labels, 'datasets' => [$data]];
      }
  }
  

Let’s use it for [Project X] first to test performance with our dataset size."