Laravel Time Series Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Feature scoping for dashboards and reporting. This package is the "last mile" piece for anything that needs "count/sum/average per day/week/month": admin dashboards, usage analytics, KPI cards, activity trends, billing/metering rollups, rate-limit monitoring, and lightweight ops health views. It lets you commit to shipping a reporting surface in a sprint rather than scheduling a data-infrastructure project.
• Build vs. buy vs. adopt. It reframes the classic three-way choice into four: (a) hand-roll GROUP BY/date_trunc queries everywhere, (b) adopt this package, (c) stand up a time-series database (TimescaleDB, ClickHouse, InfluxDB), or (d) buy a product-analytics SaaS. The package occupies the "small, cheap, stays inside our Postgres/MySQL" slot — the decision it supports is deferring the TSDB investment until volume proves it necessary.
• Data architecture coupling decision. Choosing it means metrics live in the primary relational database alongside transactional tables. That is a real product-architecture commitment: it affects database load, backup/retention policy, and the future migration story. It should be an explicit decision, not a default.
• Roadmap sequencing. Enables "ship the dashboard now, revisit analytics infra in 2–3 quarters," with the caveat that you should keep the seam (a repository/service interface) so swapping the storage layer later is a refactor, not a rewrite.
• Explicitly not decided by this package: the visualization layer, event ingestion at scale, downsampling/retention policies, real-time streaming, or complex analytics (funnels, cohorts, sessionization). Do not let adoption of this package be read as an analytics platform strategy.

When to Consider This Package

Adopt when:

• You are on Laravel, already running MySQL/Postgres, and the metrics are moderate volume — think thousands to low millions of data points, refreshed on minute-to-hour cadence, not per-second.
• The consumers are internal (admin panels, ops dashboards, team reporting) where a stale-by-a-minute number is fine and there is no uptime SLA on the chart.
• Your team values Eloquent-native, testable code and is willing to read, pin, and if necessary fork a small MIT-licensed package.
• You need period/interval/date-range querying plus sum/average/min/max aggregation and caching, and you'd otherwise spend one to three weeks re-implementing exactly that.
• You have verified Laravel and PHP version compatibility yourself. The last release was February 2022 (v1.0.0-beta-9), so assume you are adopting code, not a supported product.

Look elsewhere when:

• Write volume is high (events per second) or you need compression, continuous aggregates, downsampling, or automated retention — use TimescaleDB, ClickHouse, or InfluxDB.
• You need sub-minute granularity, streaming, or real-time customer-facing SLAs.
• Procurement, compliance, or long-term-support requirements apply. Beta-tagged, unmaintained since 2022, ~96 stars, effectively single-maintainer is a vendor-risk profile most orgs won't accept for revenue-critical paths.
• You need product-analytics depth (funnels, cohorts, retention curves) — buy a product-analytics tool.
• Nobody on the team will own the fork. An unowned dependency in the reporting path is a future outage.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For executives: "There's a small open-source library that gives us the aggregation layer for dashboards — daily/weekly rollups, averages, caching — out of the box. It keeps the data in our existing database, costs nothing in licensing, and avoids standing up new infrastructure. Realistic estimate: it saves one to three weeks of engineering on the first dashboard, and it's MIT-licensed so there's no lock-in. The trade-off is that it's a beta release with no maintainer activity since early 2022, so we treat it as code we own rather than a vendor product — a day or two of review, our own tests around it, and a clean boundary so we can replace it with a proper time-series database if volume grows."

For engineering: "Eloquent models plus migrations for series and entries, querying by period/interval/date range, sum/avg/min/max aggregation helpers, and caching — with a small, testable surface area. It fits the framework idiomatically. Before we take it: verify Laravel/PHP compatibility against our version, pin the exact beta tag, wrap it behind a repository interface so we can swap storage later, add integration tests covering our query patterns, and put a monitor on table growth. Budget roughly one to two days for audit and hardening, and name an owner."

Risk framing to state plainly: low stars, single maintainer, beta semver, and a two-year-plus gap since the last release mean this is a short-to-medium-horizon accelerator, not a long-term dependency. Approve it as a time-to-market trade with a defined exit path, not as infrastructure.