Matt Curry points out a tool that several CakePHP developers might not know about - the CakePHP debug kit.

You know when there's something out there that you know you will like, but for whatever reason you don't check it out right away. Like the TV show Arrested Development or fleece. That was me with the CakePHP DebugKit. For those even more out of the loop then me, the DebugKit is a CakePHP plugin that adds a bunch of information panels to your app.

The DebugKit gives you some of the vital stats of your CakePHP application at your fingertips. You can grab session information, check out the last request information, get a log of SQL statements, get the loading times of parts of the page, view a log file you can add to and see how much memory the current page of the site is using.