A unified error debug timeline

When you're debugging an error, context is everything. Knowing that a query failed is useful, but knowing that it failed right after a Redis cache miss, tells a completely different story.

Until now, the error page showed events grouped by type. You could look at queries, logs or glows, but you had to mentally piece together the order of operations yourself. The debug tab now shows all events on a single, chronological timeline.

Adding more context

Previously Flare could show you the following event types:

• Queries running on your database
• Logs written by your application
• Flare specific glows
• Livewire components being rendered
• The PHP command or job currently running

We've extended this list with a few new types:

HTTP client requests Outgoing HTTP calls your application makes are now visible. We show you what the response code was and the request method.

Redis commands Whether it's a GET, SET, LPUSH, or EXPIRE, you'll know exactly what your application asked Redis to do and how long it took.

Filesystem operations Reads, writes, deletes: we track what operation happened and which files were used in the process. If something goes wrong, the operation gets marked as "failed".

Caching operations A cache hit or miss can make a world of difference in code paths taken. Information like this might be crucial for debugging issues.

How it works

The newer versions of the Flare clients (spatie/laravel-flare and spatie/flare-client-php starting from v2) were completely rewritten to support our performance tracing feature.

As part of tracing, we started recording a lot more events within your application, so it made sense to also include these when an error happens.

You can configure which events are recorded when an error happens, during tracing, and how many items of each event type are stored. More information can be found in the documentation of our packages.