Larator Review: Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:01] show you a very useful tool called Larator to monitor your Laravel application from all possible angles. So, when the home page says connect everything that happens in your Laravel application, it's pretty much

[00:16] everything. Look at the menu items on the left. I've been trying Larator for a few weeks now and I can show you real numbers, charts, and entries what Larator can do. So, if you're currently using something like Laravel Night Watch

[00:30] or similar service, Larator is another alternative and a pretty strong one. And disclaimer, this video is sponsored by Larator, but I've been following the journey of the product and its author, Srinath. I hope I pronounced it

[00:43] correctly. So, here's him on Twitter and this is a fascinating story of a person genuinely going deeper with the product trying to deliver a very useful thing for the community. So, let me show you what's inside and how you can use

[00:57] Larator and what are its advantages over something like Laravel Night Watch. So, sign up on their website. This is the documentation and then you follow the installation guide which looks like this. It's pretty similar to Laravel

[01:12] Night Watch and other similar services. You install a package, you get your API keys, and then you put Larator sync after deployment and also optionally you can send more metrics which I did in my case. And I've tested it on my website

[01:29] AI Coding Deal .com which gets like a few hundred visitors per day and these beginning of this video. So, in addition to the default dashboard of requests and sessions and most active users, which is important because it integrates with

[01:44] your well, Laravel everything, user model, sessions, and stuff like that. Then we can scroll down and see more metrics on the dashboard like total jobs, requests, cache events, queries, and average query duration. and you for

[01:58] example may take a look and see some weird peak here and yesterday's evening there were 975 database queries for some reason and you may start investigating. Then let's briefly go through the menu items. So

[02:13] issues with 404s here. Also interesting thing here is bot requests. So those are tracked as well. So I realized how many bots are attacking the websites at the

[02:25] Feedly is still alive with three subscribers. That's cool. Then Net subscribers. That's cool. Then Net NewsWire and others. So I felt even I felt important with my small website with this one. Then routes. What routes

[02:40] are the most popular and average duration and P95 and you can of course filter by days or hours in this case. Requests is a bit different from routes. Requests is a bit different from routes. In a way similar thing but with statuses

[02:55] and with charts visually and also you can see 404s here and again trying to hack in a way. So looking at those lists and charts, this is another proof how many automations we have these days, bots and crawlers and malicious things

[03:11] on our website. Then there are sessions for example and I can click on any session and see what that bot actually was going for. So it got only to one page but maybe others non-bot users would go for more. So I can open my own

[03:27] session where I was browsing through benchmarking and this is how you get those results. Then there are artisan commands which some of them are in the of them are in the scheduler and you can see again how much does it schedule

[03:44] tasks. This is almost the same thing and also status healthy or not healthy and if there are failures here as well. Jobs. So I'm using another system called demonstrate in another video on this channel. So, jobs from that one and

[04:00] processed. Let's see. Those are the details about specific jobs and also job insights. This is interesting. Insights about specific job and duration and average wait time and stuff like that. Exceptions. Pretty recently, I got one

[04:15] exception with unique slug, I remember. So, Laravel is also an exception tracker. Then database queries. This is a typical thing for such tracking systems. So, yeah, the data is here.

[04:29] What else? For example, logs. You can view the logs from your Laravel log also here. So, all of that from just installing Laravel and enabling that. So, I didn't actually enable manually anything. And this is kind of the point

[04:42] and advantage here. Almost zero config system with a lot of data based on your Laravel application. And a few things kind of cherry on top. So, for example, you can have DB schema here. You can have your health check. And those are

[04:57] activate it with additional configuration. There are feature flags, which I don't have in my project. You can add custom events and alerts. For example, alert on exceptions. So, yeah, a lot of things. In addition, you get

[05:13] emails like this for exceptions. So, it's exception tracker again with more details. And also yesterday, I released this email, which I didn't even know I would get. The period and weekly performance snapshot, which looks like

[05:29] this. Interesting PDF that you can present during your meeting to your that, there are quite a few customization options. So, here in the documentation, you can have environment variables with enable or disable

[05:43] something or, for example, max events per occurrence. Also, you can filter stuff. So, what events to log or not to log. There are a lot of available overrides, like ignore specific requests, like these ones. Also, for

[06:00] personal data or sensitive data, there's redacting, so you can register redactor, which would hide or redact email addresses, IP addresses, and other user

[06:12] details like this. Or you can go the opposite direction and add additional information for authenticated user, like user ID, something specific. This is also possible. And now, let's check the pricing page and compare to something

[06:27] like Nightwatch. So, here's pricing. Free trial, 300K events, which may be a lot or not a lot, depending on your project. And then the price may look similar to Nightwatch, $20 per month for 20 million events and then extra per

[06:44] events. But, what is an event? For all those things that I've shown you in this video, how many events did I get? So, this is my billing page and currently I'm on free plan, but the author assigned me 1 million events. But,

[06:57] assigned me 1 million events. But, during this period, I received that many events per day or per month, and this is probably the main number, projected end of month event usage. So, I would run out of free trial. On this case, it's

[07:11] out of free trial. On this case, it's not 300,000, it's more. But, the usage is pretty stable and then I would pay $20 for this month, which again contains 20 million events. So, I would totally not jump over $20 per month. And we can

[07:27] actually compare that pricing to Nightwatch. So, Laravel creator smartly added a separate page comparison against Nightwatch. And of course, he is biased and of course, he will say everything that it's best Laravel Nightwatch

[07:42] alternative and Larater gives you more. So, it's a bit too salesy in my opinion. And of course, in head-to-head capabilities, he will emphasize what

[07:54] Larater has, what Nightwatch doesn't have. But also, there are things the deployment tracking is supported by Nightwatch and not supported by Larater. So, it's pretty fair. But in terms of pricing, there's the calculator. But in

[08:09] general, let me zoom that in a bit. Nightwatch for $20 per month gives 7.5 million events at the time of shooting this video, and Larater gives more for the same $20 per month. And then there's calculator at the bottom, which with

[08:25] default values like 500K requests per month, and these numbers are pre-filled. And it shows, of course, again, very good move from marketing and sales point of view, it feels like Larater is cheaper than Nightwatch. But this comes

[08:39] if you are over $20 plan on Nightwatch. And the final note about Larater is changelog and about page, and I do want to emphasize. I like the stories of the builders, and by using Larater, you will

[08:52] support a builder who is really passionate about what he does. So, this is the changelog with new things appearing in August and in July. So, pretty active. But also, in about section, the story behind why Larater

[09:07] section, the story behind why Larater exists, and it started way back in '24. So, it's not vibe coded, it's not a one-shot thing. It has been around for, well, a few years now. And it started even before Laravel Nightwatch, the

[09:21] idea, the initial commit. But the release was a year after, and the first paying customer was a few months even later. And now it feels like Larater is ready for expansion, and you may participate in that. So, go to

[09:35] larater.com. As you saw, free trial for 300k events is available and try it for yourself on some small project. I was personally pretty impressed. Again, this video is sponsored by Larater, but I'm genuinely impressed. I'm trying to be

[09:49] unbiased reviewer on this channel, but in this case, I don't have anything bad to say, to be honest. It just works. What do you guys think about such tools in general? What are you use? Are you using Nightwatch, other competitors? And

[10:03] what do you think about the future and potential of Larater? Let's discuss in the comments below. That's it for this time and see you guys in other videos.