Laravel Periscope — Telescope with a little more utility

It's been about six years since I last wrote a blog. With the new age of AI, I want to try something different: sharing the recent projects I've been working on, how quickly they came together, and how useful they've been.

Right now I'm working with a company that runs a large number of Laravel installations, and I find Laravel Telescope to be an extremely useful package. It does have drawbacks, chief among them is that filtering by date and searching are practically impossible. After a year of using it and complaining, I thought my new Claude skills might help solve that problem.

I did a bit of research and discovered that a few people have already extended Telescope, so check out their work if you're interested. I created something that meets my needs and the needs of the projects I'm working on, and I've published it on Packagist for anyone to try. It's open source, so feel free to explore the code.

A few things that are useful to know:

• I'm not trying to replace Telescope or add extra database tables or dependencies, so there's no additional bloat. The interface provides a clean view of what's happening, with simple pagination instead of Telescope's endless scroll. This lets you return to the page you were on, which is very handy.
• Everything is processed in the order of the database tables, making tracking straightforward.
• There are plenty of links back to the official Telescope pages for each feature.
• I use Telescope mainly for debugging, when something goes wrong on the live server or when working locally to monitor the development process and fix bugs.
• Telescope offers a wealth of functionality, but I focused on the features I find most useful when building software: search and filter. By default it shows the last 24 hours of records. Our logs generate a few million rows a day, which makes isolating a single request nearly impossible.
• I added "from" and "to" date filters that let you narrow the results to the rows you actually care about. For example, on the platform I work on we run a re-bill at 5:30am. If I want to look at Telescope at 9:00am, I would otherwise have to sift through pages of data. The date filter lets me select the specific requests I need and scroll through the relevant entries.
• The other major feature is the lifecycle view, which I haven't seen elsewhere. For any given row, it shows the request it belongs to and the sequence of events leading up to an error. You can navigate forward and backward to see exactly how things happened.

Feel free to get the package and give it a try: packagist.org/packages/seanbarton/laravel-periscope.

ps: Yes I used Gemini for the logo. Why not.