I got tired of debugging Laravel queues blind — so I built a free dashboard (no Redis needed)

Abinash Bhatta — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 10:49:25 +0000

I was working on a Laravel project for a client — standard stuff, database queue driver, shared hosting, nothing fancy.

A payment job started failing silently.

No alert. No dashboard. Just a frustrated client asking why invoices weren't being sent.

I opened the failed_jobs table and started reading raw JSON stack traces. Then I ran php artisan queue:work with my eyes glued to the terminal. Then I wrote a quick throwaway script to query the jobs table.

You know the feeling.

The obvious fix is Laravel Horizon — it's a beautiful dashboard and I've used it many times. But Horizon requires Redis. This project was on shared hosting with no Redis. And honestly, for a small project, spinning up Redis just to get queue visibility felt like overkill.

So I spent a few evenings building something lightweight.

What I built

Lightweight Queue Inspector — a debugging dashboard for Laravel apps using the database queue driver.

No Redis. No Horizon. Just your existing jobs and failed_jobs tables.

Here's what it gives you:

Pending jobs — see everything waiting in the queue, with collapsible payload inspection
Failed jobs — full exception messages, stack traces, retry or delete individually or in bulk
Successful jobs — execution time per job (colour coded green/orange/red) and memory usage
Dashboard stats — pending count, failed count, avg execution time, top failing job
Filters — filter any page by queue name or job class
Security warnings — terminal warnings if you forgot to add auth middleware, or if auth is set but no login route exists

How it works under the hood

The package hooks into Laravel's built-in queue events — no extra config, no extra tables beyond one small metrics table:

Event	What gets recorded
`JobProcessing`	job class, queue name, started_at
`JobProcessed`	execution_time_ms, memory_usage_mb, status = success
`JobFailed`	execution_time_ms, exception message, status = failed

These events fire automatically when php artisan queue:work processes a job. You get full visibility into what's running, how long it takes, and what's failing — without touching a single line of your application code.

Install in 2 minutes

composer require abinashbhatta/lightweight-queue-inspector
php artisan migrate

Visit /queue-inspector. Done.

The package auto-discovers — no need to register anything in config/app.php.

Always protect it in production:

// config/queue-inspector.php
'middleware' => ['web', 'auth'],

Who is this for?

If you're using Horizon and Redis already — stick with Horizon, it's excellent.

This is for the rest of us:

Small to medium projects on shared hosting
Internal tools and admin panels
Early-stage apps where Redis is overkill
Anyone who just wants to see what their queues are doing right now

What's coming next

I'm planning to add auto-refresh, email/Slack alerts on job failure, dark mode, and charts showing job trends over time. The full roadmap is on GitHub.

GitHub: https://github.com/abinash889/lightweight-queue-inspector
Packagist: https://packagist.org/packages/abinashbhatta/lightweight-queue-inspector