I definitively left my freelance commitments and now I’m working full time to make my SaaS product profitable.
Tags: php, monitoring, laravel, performance
Published: 2019-06-13 13:32:30

Hi, I'm Valerio, a Software Engineer and Laravel-certified developer based in Italy. I worked with teams to help improve their software for more than 10 years through Italy and France.

In the last few months I worked hard to go out with my new SaaS adventure called Inspector — Painless real-time monitoring dashboard for Laravel developers.

I definitively left my freelance commitments and now I’m working full time to make Inspector the easiest and reliable monitoring tool for back-end developers.

As developers, part of our challenge is trying to anticipate all the problems that could happen when releasing a software in production. Sadly, it’s impossible to anticipate all of them. This is a fact of developers' life. 

In Agencies or as freelancer I experienced an even more complicated scenario, because we need to manage multiple projects and customers. We are strongly connected with customers, and we are also highly exposed to competitive risks if a project doesn’t go as expected.

The short survey below illustrates the sad reality:

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*ZUa7qjr4gw6640EnKsbkmQ.png)

## A huge amount of time wasted, just on checks. Nothing new is produced.
There is nothing more valuable than our time. Yet as developers, we often spend up to 50 percent of our time simply checking that our app is working (probably for fear?).

A huge amount of time is wasted, producing nothing.

As a software engineer and Laravel-certified developer who has spent more than a decade helping teams to improve their software, I often experienced this frustrating reality.

I’ve feel exactly the same emotions when working on a new project with a new customer. After the first design phase, the app goes into production and starts to serve real users.

We know we are powerless in the face of issues and drawbacks, and we will have to manage the customer to the best of our ability if something goes wrong.

But, we make software; automation is in our DNA, but here is the trap. We are always focused on how to automate our customers' work and we forget that we can do the same (or even better) with our own.

Adopting an automated tool that monitors my software and alerts me to any errors has a huge impact on my ability to keep my customers happy and work on code refactoring with confidence.

That’s why I become passionate about this topic. I’ve written many other articles about real-time automated monitoring.

## Creating a software solution to automate performance inspection
We all know the saying “time is money.”

It was clear to me that a tool that lets us do the same job in half the time could be a really valuable solution. With that in mind, I set out to develop a better way to inspect applications.

I started from my habits, like inspecting my applications to ensure that everything is working well. The result of my extensive research and development is Inspector.

I can trust Inspector to debug my applications for me, 24/7, and alert me to any problems or issues in real-time so I can address them immediately.

### Inspector vs. other solutions
You can find many other tools to monitor your applications, but most products on the market have clearly negative characteristics for web agencies and freelancers:

- **They are designed for infrastructure monitoring** (CPU, RAM, Bandwidth) and not specific for application level. In addition, they are generalists and don’t provide you specific information about your platform (e.g. plugin and theme performance for WordPress, job, artisan command, etc.).
- **They require you to install software at server level.** Inspector is the first solution that purposely avoids this.
- **They are very tricky to integrate and use.** You are asked to spend weeks to configure your environment. With Inspector, you can instead run a simple “composer require” or just install a plugin.
- **They don’t work well for teams.**
- **They are not designed for PHP.**

Inspector is designed especially for web agencies and freelancers. It requires no installation at the server level so it’s perfect for those using managed cloud hosting services like Cloudways, RunCloud, and others.

## What’s next
The next goal is to drive interested developers to the website and collect as much feedback as possible. I started yet to produce valuable technical guides to allows other developers to get better results by using Inspector.

After the first feedback I have jot down a list of the improvements I will work on immediately:

- Improve UI
- Extend the documentation
- Produce more “step by step” guides

*Other developers feedback are driving the product roadmap and I would be happy if you joined me on this journey.*

*Try Inspector, it’s free, and write me what you think about: *https://www.inspector.dev