Getting started

Sign in, create your first project, and connect an application.

Once the LaraOwl server is installed, this guide takes you from an empty dashboard to receiving live telemetry from your first monitored application.

Prerequisites

• A running LaraOwl server with an admin account (created during installation).
• A Laravel application (PHP 8.3+) you want to monitor.

Sign in and create a project

1. Log in

   Open your LaraOwl server URL in a browser and sign in with the admin credentials you created during installation.

2. Create a team

   LaraOwl is multi-tenant. On first login you’re prompted to create a team — this is the top-level workspace that owns your projects, members, and integrations. Name it after your organization.

3. Create a project

   Inside your team, click New Project and give it a name (for example, the name of the app you’re about to monitor). A project is one monitored application: it has its own dashboard, API token, alert rules, and data-retention policy.

4. Copy the API token

   Open Project Settings → API Keys and copy the generated token. You’ll use it to authenticate the client package in the next step.

Connect an application

Install and configure the client package inside the Laravel app you want to monitor.

1. Install the client package

   In your monitored application’s directory:

   composer require laraowl/client
   
2. Run the setup command

   The interactive installer writes the required configuration for you:

   php artisan laraowl:install
   

   Alternatively, add the values manually to the app’s .env:

   LARAOWL_SERVER_URL=https://your-laraowl-server.com
   LARAOWL_TOKEN=your_project_api_token
   
3. (Optional) Forward application logs

   To ship your app’s logs to LaraOwl’s centralized log viewer, add the laraowl channel to your log stack:

   LOG_STACK=stack,laraowl
   
4. Generate traffic

   Hit a few routes in your application. Within seconds, requests, queries, and any exceptions begin flowing into the project dashboard in real time.

If data doesn’t appear, confirm the server’s queue worker and Reverb process are running, and that LARAOWL_SERVER_URL is reachable from your app. See Troubleshooting.

Navigate the dashboard

Each project dashboard is organized into focused sections:

Section	What you’ll find
Overview	Project health at a glance — request volume, error rate, and performance.
Requests	HTTP traffic with route-level breakdowns, status codes, and durations.
Exceptions	Grouped errors with stack traces, occurrence counts, and resolution status.
Queries	Database query analytics, slow queries, and N+1 detection.
Jobs / Commands / Scheduled Tasks	Queue, Artisan, and cron execution history and failures.
Mail / Notifications / Cache / Outgoing Requests	Channel- and key-level analytics for the rest of your stack.
Users	Authenticated vs. guest activity and per-user drill-down.
Uptime	Availability monitoring with response-time history.
Logs	Centralized, searchable application logs.
Security / Firewall	Threat detection and optional Cloudflare WAF management.
Settings	General, Integrations, Alert Rules, Thresholds, API Keys, and Cloudflare.

Use the time-range filter (1h, 24h, 7d, 14d, 30d, or a custom range) at the top of each section to scope charts and tables.

Set up alerts

To be notified when something breaks:

1. Go to Project Settings → Integrations and connect a channel — Slack, Discord, Telegram, email, or a webhook.
2. Open Settings → Alert Rules and enable triggers such as new exceptions, high latency, uptime down, or error spikes.
3. Configure throttling to avoid alert fatigue during incidents.

Set Thresholds (per-project response-time, query-time, and job-runtime budgets) so LaraOwl automatically flags regressions before your users notice.

Next steps

Configuration

Tune retention, mail, and real-time settings.

Troubleshooting

Fix common connection and dashboard issues.