What is Laravel Horizon, and what does it offer for monitoring and managing Redis queues?

Short answer

It is a live dashboard and monitoring system for Redis queues, supporting intelligent load balancing, automatic worker scaling (Auto-scaling), wait-time tracking, and failed-job monitoring.

Explanation

Horizon provides a graphical interface and efficient management engine for production servers that use Redis. It tracks job processing rate per second (Throughput) and queue wait time (Wait Time). Its main feature is Auto-balancing: it automatically increases worker threads on busy queues and reduces them after a peak, according to config/horizon.php.

Code example

// config/horizon.php
'production' => [
    'supervisor-1' => [
        'connection' => 'redis',
        'queue' => ['default', 'high'],
        'balance' => 'auto',
        'minProcesses' => 5,
        'maxProcesses' => 30,
    ],
]

Common mistakes

• Trying to use Laravel Horizon with standard database queues (Database Driver); it is only for Redis.

Follow-up questions

• How do Queues work in Laravel, and what is the purpose of the ShouldQueue interface?

Sources

• Laravel docs — Laravel Horizon