Monitoring the surface profile real time on the manufacturing line of planar products has been accomplished by employing the scattering of a laser light. The laser beam was focused onto the surface and the direction of the reflected beam was utilized to obtain the slope of the surface facet. By taking data fast enough, it was possible to obtain the microscopic surface structure. The mean roughness thus obtained agreed well with the ones found with the mechanical stylus instrument. There was discrepancy between the two results as to the number of peaks per com. A simple model based on the deconvolution of the raw data was found adequate to improve the agreement to an acceptable level.