Laravel Pulse on a small VPS: the only cards I keep unmuted
Short answer: On aviwebsquad.in I keep Pulse focused on slow requests, exceptions, and queue wait—with sampling enabled so a blog CMS does not generate megabytes of ingest hourly.
Complements What is telemetry? with app-specific thresholds.
Recorders enabled
| Recorder | Why |
|---|---|
| SlowRequests | Finds N+1 after Filament changes |
| Exceptions | 500s on Inertia pages |
| Queues | Media conversion backlog |
| SlowQueries | Postgres missing indexes |
Recorders muted
- User requests every path (too noisy)
- Cache hits (not actionable at this scale)
Authorization
viewPulse gate—same admin allowlist as Horizon.
Pair with Horizon
Pulse shows symptoms; Horizon shows job failures. Horizon on one VPS doc covers worker side.
FAQ
Redis ingest?
Enabled when SQLite ingest lagged—worth it if Redis already runs for queues.
Uptime alternative?
External ping on /up health route—Pulse is not synthetic monitoring.
AdSense traffic spikes?
Watch slow requests; do not over-provision until Pulse proves need.
Maintenance note (Sep 2026)
Re-validated internal links and examples against the live aviwebsquad.in CMS after the Hostinger migration; guidance in this article still matches production.