Mastering Laravel 12 Horizon: Real-Time Queue Monitoring Made Elegant

In modern web applications, queues play a crucial role in improving performance, scalability, and user experience. Whether it's sending emails, processing image uploads, or executing time-consuming tasks, Laravel queues help offload heavy jobs from the main request-response cycle.

But how do you monitor, manage, and optimize those background jobs?

Meet Laravel Horizon – a beautifully designed dashboard and powerful queue manager built specifically for Laravel's Redis-based queue system.

In this blog, we'll explore what Laravel Horizon is, why it's a game-changer, how to set it up, and best practices for using it in production.

🌟 What is Laravel Horizon?

Laravel Horizon is an elegant queue monitoring dashboard for Laravel applications that use the Redis queue driver. Developed by the Laravel team, it provides:

A real-time web dashboard to monitor jobs
Insight into failed, pending, and completed jobs
Job retry and tag filtering capabilities
Metrics on throughput and runtime
Queue balancing for better performance
Auto-scaling workers in production

Horizon is tailored exclusively for Redis, making it ultra-fast and efficient.

🎯 Why Use Horizon?

Here’s why Laravel Horizon is a must-have for serious Laravel developers:

Feature	Benefit
✅ Real-time Monitoring	See job status updates live as they happen
📊 Metrics & Analytics	View average job runtime, throughput, and job trends
💥 Failed Job Management	Easily retry or inspect failed jobs
⚙️ Queue Load Balancing	Auto-adjust worker queues for optimal performance
🚦 Tag-Based Filtering	Track specific job types using custom tags
📁 Redis Integration	Seamless performance on Laravel’s Redis queue

🔧 Installing Laravel Horizon

Installing Horizon is as easy as running a few Artisan commands:

1. Require Horizon

composer require laravel/horizon

2. Publish Configuration

php artisan horizon:install

This will publish the config/horizon.php file, where you can configure workers, supervisors, and environments.

3. Run Horizon

php artisan horizon

Visit http://your-app.test/horizon and enjoy your new dashboard!

🧠 How Horizon Works

Laravel Horizon works by managing supervisors — processes that monitor your queue workers. In config/horizon.php, you define the number of workers, queues, balance strategy, and connection.

'environments' => [
    'production' => [
        'supervisor-1' => [
            'connection' => 'redis',
            'queue' => ['default'],
            'balance' => 'auto',
            'processes' => 10,
            'tries' => 3,
        ],
    ],
],

Horizon uses Redis not just to store queued jobs, but also for metrics, tags, and recent job tracking.

📺 Exploring the Dashboard

Here’s what the Horizon dashboard offers:

1. Dashboard View

Gives you an overview of queue metrics like job runtime, queue wait time, and throughput.

2. Jobs Tab

Lists recent jobs with their statuses (pending, completed, failed). You can view detailed info, tags, and retry jobs directly from the UI.

3. Failed Jobs

View the error stack trace and retry failed jobs with a single click.

4. Metrics

See graphs of queue performance over time—perfect for debugging performance issues or traffic spikes.

5. Supervisors & Workers

View each worker's real-time activity, restart them, and monitor queue health.

📡 Deploying Horizon in Production

Horizon runs as a long-lived process. In production, you should daemonize it using a process manager like Supervisor or systemd.

Example Supervisor config:

[program:horizon]
process_name=%(program_name)s
command=php /path-to-your-app/artisan horizon
autostart=true
autorestart=true
user=www-data
redirect_stderr=true
stdout_logfile=/path-to-your-app/storage/logs/horizon.log

Restart Supervisor:

sudo supervisorctl reread
sudo supervisorctl update
sudo supervisorctl start horizon

🛡️ Securing Horizon

By default, Horizon is accessible to anyone who visits /horizon. In production, you should restrict access.

Update the HorizonServiceProvider:

Horizon::auth(function ($request) {
    return auth()->check() && auth()->user()->isAdmin();
});

You can also use Laravel Sanctum or custom middleware for more control.

🧩 Tagging Jobs for Better Insights

You can tag jobs using the tags() method in your job class:

public function tags()
{
    return ['order:'.$this->orderId];
}

This allows you to track jobs related to specific users, orders, or events directly in Horizon.

⚖️ Horizon vs Laravel Queue Worker

Feature	`php artisan queue:work`	Laravel Horizon
Monitoring UI	❌	✅ Real-time dashboard
Metrics	❌	✅ Job runtime, wait time, graphs
Auto-Scaling	❌ Manual configuration	✅ Balance and scaling options
Retry Jobs UI	❌	✅ Click-to-retry failed jobs
Tags & Filtering	❌	✅ Tags, filters, tracking

If your project has growing queue demands, Horizon is a no-brainer upgrade.

💡 Best Practices with Horizon

✅ Use tags on important jobs for tracking
✅ Monitor throughput to optimize performance
✅ Set up alerts for job failures (via Slack, email)
✅ Regularly review failed jobs and retry appropriately
✅ Run Horizon with Supervisor for stability
✅ Protect the dashboard with auth middleware

🏁 Conclusion

Laravel Horizon is more than just a pretty interface—it's a powerful tool for building, maintaining, and scaling queue-driven applications. With live metrics, a polished UI, and Redis-powered performance, Horizon gives developers the tools they need to confidently manage background processing in production.

Whether you’re running a SaaS platform, e-commerce store, or real-time notification system, Horizon gives you full visibility and control over your job queues.

🧠 Code with confidence. Monitor with elegance. That’s the power of Laravel Horizon.