Job lifecycle logging

Log every job transition, and the queue failures Laravel handles without a word.

Skyline can log every transition a queued job makes (queued, reserved, released, migrated, retried, timed out, completed, failed) to a log channel you choose, with each line tagged by job id so one job's whole history is a single grep. It also logs the failures Laravel handles without saying anything: a dispatch discarded over a held ShouldBeUnique lock, a unique lock left behind by a job that never ran, a job whose reservation expired while it may still be running, and a job dropped by middleware as though it had completed.

Those silent cases are the reason the feature exists. A queued job passes through half a dozen states and Laravel logs almost none of them, and for several of the failures above the framework fires no event at all.

Enabling#

Point log_channel at the channel that should receive the lines:

// config/horizon.php
'log_channel' => env('HORIZON_LOG_CHANNEL'),

# .env
HORIZON_LOG_CHANNEL=queue

Leave it unset to use the application's default channel. If the configured channel name does not resolve, Skyline falls back to the default channel rather than throwing out of a queue listener — a logging misconfiguration should never take down job processing.

Log level is the volume dial#

Every event is emitted at a level chosen to match its operational severity, so you tune coverage purely by setting the level on the channel — no separate on/off switches.

• error: terminal failures only.
• warning: the above, plus timeouts, expired reservations, exceptions caught during an attempt, and the silent drops and stranded locks listed below.
• info: the above, plus releases, migrations and retries.
• debug: everything, including a pending / reserved / completed line for every successful job.

The events#

Lifecycle#

Failures Laravel doesn't report#

The three middleware events and overlap_lock.released_from_dashboard need Skyline's drop-in middleware. Laravel 13.25 added a UniqueJobSkipped event for a skipped dispatch, but the framework still logs nothing for it. Skyline writes unique_lock.discarded from that event where it exists and from its own cache wrapper on earlier versions.

Log lines are for reading after the fact. To be told while it is happening, turn on alerts.

Lines read like this, with the job id in the message so a plain text search finds it:

[job:8813] queued onto [default] (delayed 30s)
[job:8813] migrated to [default] and is ready to run.
[job:8813] reserved from [default] and started processing.
[job:8813] released back to [default] (reason=exception, delay=15s)
[job:8813] failed on [default] and will not be retried (RuntimeException).
[job:9120] failed on [default] without running — its retryUntil() deadline passed before a worker picked it up (reason=retry_until_expired, late_by=540s).

Structured context#

Every line also carries a structured context array, which is what you actually query once the lines are in a log pipeline. Job events include event, job_id and job, and most include connection and queue. Beyond that:

Why a job was released#

"Released back to the queue" is the most ambiguous state in a Laravel queue. It can mean the job threw, that middleware held it back, or that it called $job->release() itself. Skyline attributes it, so job.released carries a reason, and the same text appears on the job's page under Previous Attempts:

use Laravel\Horizon\Middleware\WithoutOverlapping;
use Laravel\Horizon\Middleware\RateLimited;          // or RateLimitedWithRedis
use Laravel\Horizon\Middleware\ThrottlesExceptions;  // or ThrottlesExceptionsWithRedis

Unique-lock discard caveat#

Discard logging works by instrumenting the lock the framework takes at dispatch, and it covers the application's default cache store. A job that overrides uniqueVia() to lock on a different store is not covered, and neither is a default cache repository replaced with a custom subclass.

For locks that are never released, and the paths that queue a unique job without a lock, see Unique job locks. How ShouldBeUnique behaves in the framework itself is covered in ShouldBeUnique and WithoutOverlapping under real traffic.