the blog

Introducing django-peavy

Continuing my apparent obsession with logging, I've just released django-peavy. It's a collection of logging support code for capturing your Django application logging to a database, and a (really) basic user interface for reviewing it. Notable features include:

• Middleware to tag each request with a unique ID.
• Logging filters to capture request metadata like user, remote IP, and headers.
• Logging handlers for:
  • Capturing exception information, including a copy of the Django server error page, in a database.
  • Sending error notifications to admins without revealing sensitive information like the contents of request.POST.
• A database router for sending log records to a separate database (though there are problems with South migrations you'll need to work around to do so).
• A simple user interface for browsing log records in the database.

Django request logging with rsyslog

In my original post about logging Django requests, I had only tried my code with syslog-ng. It works fine with rsyslog too.

Django request logging

I'm a big believer in the utility of web application logging. Over the years I've almost always found it more useful than debuggers in diagnosing problems. The difficulty is achieving good logging. Here's a solution for Django projects that I'm pretty happy with.