Introducing Flare’s next big feature: performance monitoring

Introducing Flare's next big feature: performance monitoring

Flare was introduced on stage at Laracon EU 2019 as the first error tracker built for Laravel. Since then, my team at Spatie has been steadily improving it, adding integrations, better JS support, and lots of smaller quality-of-life updates.

I'm happy to share that our big new feature, Performance Monitoring, is now live for everyone. After quite the journey and a lengthy beta, I can really say that Flare is now the all-in-one monitoring tool I've always wanted to use. We kept pricing the same, so you're getting two products (the best error tracker for Laravel apps + performance monitoring) for the price of one.

Let's take a look at performance monitoring

Performance monitoring gives you a complete view of what's happening in your Laravel app. The dashboard tracks everything: HTTP routes, queued jobs, Artisan commands, and database queries.

Each section shows you response or execution times with clear charts, making it easy to spot slow endpoints at a glance. In the screenshot above, you can see which routes are taking the longest (that login POST at 2,114ms might need some attention), how your background jobs are performing, and which database queries are slowing things down.

The "slowest 5%" metric is particularly useful: it helps you identify those edge cases where performance degrades, even when your averages look fine. You're not just getting numbers either; click through and you'll see the actual route names, controller methods, and SQL queries, so you know exactly where to start optimizing.

Let's click that api/users route.

The breakdown section is where things get really useful. You can see exactly which database queries ran during this request, how long each one took, and how often it appeared across your traces. In this example, that user bookings query showed up in 2,280 different requests—so you know it's a heavily-used query worth optimizing. You can also tab over to see external HTTP calls, commands, views, and even Livewire components that were part of the request.

Scroll down and you'll see the actual traces. Each one shows you the complete timeline of what happened during that request—from the initial Laravel bootstrap and routing, through middleware, down to every single database query that was executed.
All those queries are clickable. Click one and you'll see the full SQL, execution time, and all the context you need to understand what's happening.

Let's now take a look at jobs.

Jobs get the same treatment. You can see execution times for all your queued jobs, and spot the slow ones. Let's click one of them.

Click into any job and you'll see which routes triggered it, what queries it ran, and whether it called any external APIs or fired off other commands. The breakdown shows you everything that happened during execution, so if a job is taking longer than expected, you can pinpoint whether it's a slow query, an external API call, or something else entirely.

I hope you get the idea of what kind of info we can display. We have similar screens to display performance data around commands, queries, HTTP calls, views and Livewire Components.

To close off this section, let's look at the Livewire Components view, since we're proud that we could build this one. In this section you can look at the render time of each individual Livewire component. Here is the general graph for the ShipPositionTracker component.

On that page, when we scroll a bit down, you can see everything that happened in the request that rendered the component. We can see that the component itself executed a couple of queries and rendered a couple of views.

In closing

We think performance monitoring is a very powerful addition to Flare. This isn't the only feature we added recently. We also have an MCP server that allows you to integrate Flare's error tracking capabilities directly into your AI-powered development workflows.

This isn't the finish line, and we'll continue improving Flare. In addition to applying general polish across our service, we're going to start working on the next big feature: making your application logs viewable and searchable from within the Flare UI.

You can try our proven exception tracker and new performance monitoring right now. Just create your Flare account (we offer a free 10-day trial) to get started.