🚀 Laravel Error Logging with Elasticsearch

This implementation automatically captures every error in your Laravel application and stores it in Elasticsearch, providing powerful search capabilities, real-time monitoring, and comprehensive error analytics that will transform how you debug and maintain your applications.

🏷️ This file is part of a series of articles on Medium

• 📖 How to Integrate Elasticsearch with Laravel: A Step-by-Step Guide
• Using Elasticsearch for Effective Laravel Error Logging
• Mastering Exception Handling in Laravel 12: Centralized Error Management Guide

📋 Table of Contents

• ✨ Features
• 🔧 Prerequisites
• 🚀 Installation
• ⚙️ Configuration
• 💻 Usage
• 🛡️ Security Features
• 📊 Monitoring & Analytics
• 🔍 API Reference
• ⭐ Best Practices
• 🔧 Troubleshooting
• 🤝 Contributing
• 📚 Related Articles

✨ Features

🔍 Comprehensive Error Tracking

• 🎯 Automatic Exception Handling - Catches and processes all Laravel exceptions
• 🏷️ Smart Error Categorization - Automatically tags errors by type, status, environment
• 📝 Request Context Capture - Logs complete request information including headers, parameters, and user context
• ⚡ Performance Metrics - Tracks response time and memory usage for each error

🛡️ Security-First Design

• 🔒 Data Sanitization - Automatically removes sensitive data (passwords, tokens, API keys)
• 🚫 Filtered Stack Traces - Removes sensitive function arguments from traces
• 🛣️ Path Sanitization - Strips system paths from file references
• 🛡️ Header Protection - Redacts authentication and session headers

📊 Advanced Analytics

• 🔎 Real-time Search - Powerful Elasticsearch queries for error analysis
• 📈 Error Trends - Track error patterns over time
• 👥 User Impact Analysis - Identify which users are affected by errors
• 🌍 Environment Comparison - Compare error rates across environments

🎯 Exception-Specific Handling

• ✅ Authentication Exceptions - Secure handling of auth failures
• ✅ Validation Exceptions - Detailed validation error tracking
• ✅ Model Not Found Exceptions - Resource not found handling
• ✅ Authorization Exceptions - Permission error management
• ✅ HTTP Exceptions - HTTP status code tracking
• ✅ Database Query Exceptions - SQL error monitoring
• ✅ Custom Exception Support - Extensible for custom exceptions

🔧 Prerequisites

• 🐘 PHP 8.2 or higher
• 🎯 Laravel 11.x (compatible with 10.x)
• 🔍 Elasticsearch 8.x
• 📦 Composer for dependency management

🚀 Installation

# Install Elasticsearch package
composer require elasticsearch/elasticsearch

2. **Laravel Configuration**
   - Add Elasticsearch package
   - Configure environment variables
   - Set up service provider

3. **Index Design**
   Create an Elasticsearch index with the following structure:
   ```json
   {
     "mappings": {
       "properties": {
         "type": { "type": "keyword" },
         "message": { "type": "text" },
         "status": { "type": "integer" },
         "uri": { "type": "keyword" },
         "method": { "type": "keyword" },
         "user": { "type": "object" },
         "ip": { "type": "ip" },
         "trace": { "type": "text" },
         "timestamp": { "type": "date" },
         "environment": { "type": "keyword" },
         "file": { "type": "keyword" },
         "line": { "type": "integer" },
         "request_data": { "type": "object" },
         "headers": { "type": "object" },
         "response_time": { "type": "float" },
         "memory_usage": { "type": "integer" },
         "tags": { "type": "keyword" }
       }
     }
   }

⚙️ Configuration

Environment Variables

ELASTICSEARCH_HOST=http://localhost:9200
ELASTICSEARCH_USERNAME=elastic
ELASTICSEARCH_PASSWORD=your_secure_password

Service Configuration

'elk' => [
    'host_ip' => env('ELASTICSEARCH_HOST', 'http://localhost:9200'),
    'username' => env('ELASTICSEARCH_USERNAME', 'elastic'),
    'password' => env('ELASTICSEARCH_PASSWORD', ''),
],

💻 Usage Example

Sample Error Log Entry

{
   "_index": "error-logs",
   "_type": "_doc",
   "_id": "a7b8c9d0e1f2g3h4i5j6k7l8m9n0o1p2",
   "_score": 1.0,
   "_source": {
      "id": "d5e8a7b2c9f4e6a1b3d7f8e2c5a9b4d6",
      "type": "ValidationException",
      "message": "The email field is required.",
      "status": 422,
      "uri": "/api/users",
      "method": "POST",
      "user": {
         "id": "12345",
         "type": "sanctum_user",
         "name": "John Doe",
         "email": "john.doe@example.com"
      },
      "ip": "192.168.1.100",
      "user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36",
      "trace": "[{\"file\":\"/app/Http/Controllers/UserController.php\",\"line\":45,\"function\":\"validate\",\"class\":\"Illuminate\\\\Http\\\\Request\"},{\"file\":\"/app/Http/Controllers/UserController.php\",\"line\":23,\"function\":\"store\",\"class\":\"App\\\\Http\\\\Controllers\\\\UserController\"},{\"file\":\"/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Routing/Controller.php\",\"line\":54,\"function\":\"callAction\"}]",
      "timestamp": "2025-06-02T14:32:15.847Z",
      "environment": "production",
      "file": "/app/Http/Requests/CreateUserRequest.php",
      "line": 28,
      "context": {
         "request_id": "req_9f8e7d6c5b4a3210fedcba0987654321",
         "session_id": "sess_abcd1234efgh5678ijkl9012mnop3456",
         "correlation_id": "corr_xyz789abc123def456ghi789jkl012"
      },
      "request_data": {
         "input": {
            "name": "John Doe",
            "phone": "+1234567890",
            "password": "[REDACTED]"
         },
         "query": {
            "source": "mobile_app",
            "version": "1.2.3"
         },
         "files": []
      },
      "headers": {
         "host": ["api.example.com"],
         "user-agent": ["Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36"],
         "accept": ["application/json"],
         "content-type": ["application/json"],
         "authorization": ["[REDACTED]"],
         "x-requested-with": ["XMLHttpRequest"],
         "x-api-version": ["v1"],
         "cookie": ["[REDACTED]"]
      },
      "response_time": 245.67,
      "memory_usage": 8388608,
      "tags": [
         "production",
         "validationexception",
         "post",
         "client_error",
         "api",
         "authenticated"
      ]
   }
}

Best Practices

1. Security
   • Never log sensitive data
   • Implement proper data sanitization
   • Use secure authentication
   • Limit stack trace information
   • Filter request data

⭐ Best Practices

🔒 Security

• 🚫 Never log sensitive data
• 🛡️ Implement proper data sanitization
• 🔐 Use secure authentication
• 📝 Limit stack trace information
• 🧹 Filter request data

⚡ Performance

• 📊 Implement proper indexing
• 📦 Use bulk operations when possible
• 🔄 Implement connection pooling
• ⚠️ Add proper error handling
• 🔄 Include fallback mechanisms

🔧 Maintenance

• 📅 Implement index lifecycle management
• 📊 Set up proper monitoring
• 💾 Create backup strategies
• 📝 Document error patterns
• 🔍 Regular security audits

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

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