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DJANGO-LOGDB

Django-logdb enables you to log entries to a database, aggregate and act on them with certain rules, and gives you more insight in what's going on.

Django-logdb requires Django 1.3 and higher.

Description

Django-logdb has a custom logging handler that writes log entries to the database. It therefore integrates nicely with your existing logging configuration and you can decide what log entries are written to the database.

The Django admin site is extended with a graphical view of recent log entries to provide more insight in what is going on. The log messages are grouped by log level or "type of log entry".

To minimize database access, aggregation is done via a Django command that you can call periodically (as a cronjob).

Install

The easiest way to install the package is via setuptools:

easy_install django-logdb

Once installed, update your Django settings.py and add djangologdb to your INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    ...
    'djangologdb',
)

In your Django urls.py, include the djangologdb.urls before the admin:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    ...
    (r'^admin/djangologdb/', include('djangologdb.urls')),
    ...
    (r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
)

Optionally, if you want to log exceptions, add the middleware:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
    ...
    'djangologdb.middleware.LoggingMiddleware',
)

Run python manage.py syncdb to create the database tables.

Setup logging

Now, for the actual logging part, you should use the database logging handler. There are two ways to do this: Using only Python code, or, by using a configuration file. Both methods are explained below.

To add this handler via Python to, for example, your root logger, you can add the following to your Django settings.py:

import logging
from djangologdb.handler import DjangoDatabaseHandler, add_handler

logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG)
logger = logging.getLogger()

# A bug in Django causes the settings to load twice. Using
# this handler instead of logging.addHandler works around that.
add_handler(logger, DjangoDatabaseHandler())

To use this handler via a logging configuration file, simply import the handlers module from djangologdb in your Django settings.py before loading the configuration from a file:

from djangologdb import handlers
logging.config.fileConfig(...)

Then in your logging configuration file, you can add it from the handlers namespace and add it to any logger you want:

[handlers]
keys=djangologdb

[logger_root]
level=NOTSET
handlers=djangologdb

[handler_djangologdb]
class=handlers.DjangoDatabaseHandler
args=()

Configuration

You can set the following settings in your Django settings.py file:

LOGDB_HISTORY_DAYS

The number of days to show in the various graphs.

Default:

LOGDB_HISTORY_DAYS = 30
LOGDB_INTERVAL

The timedelta between each datapoint in the various graphs.

Default:

LOGDB_INTERVAL = datetime.timedelta(1) # 1 day
LOGDB_RULES

Define rules to create a new log entry when certain conditions are true.

Default:

LOGDB_RULES =
    [{
        # If 3 logs with level WARNING or higher occur in 5 minutes or
        # less, create a new log with level CRITICAL.
        'conditions': {
            'min_level': logging.WARNING,
            'qualname': '',
            'min_times_seen': 3,
            'within_time': datetime.timedelta(0, 5 * 60),
        },
        'actions': {
            'level': logging.CRITICAL,
        }
    }]
LOGDB_LEVEL_COLORS

Set colors to use in the graph for level based datasets.

Default:

LOGDB_LEVEL_COLORS =
    {
        logging.DEBUG: '#c2c7d1',
        logging.INFO: '#aad2e9',
        logging.WARNING: '#b9a6d7',
        logging.ERROR: '#deb7c1',
        logging.CRITICAL: '#e9a8ab',
    }
LOGDB_MEDIA_ROOT

Set the absolute path to the directory of django-logdb media.

Default:

LOGDB_MEDIA_ROOT = os.path.join(djangologdb.__path__[0], 'media')
LOGDB_MEDIA_URL

Set the URL that handles the media served from LOGDB_MEDIA_ROOT. Make sure to add a trailing slash at the end. If settings.DEBUG=True, the media will be served by Django.

Default:

LOGDB_MEDIA_URL = '/admin/djangologdb/media/'

Commands

aggregate_logs

Aggregates log entries and triggers any action with matching rules.

Usage:
python django-admin.py aggregate_logs
Options:
-s, --skip-actions
 Do not use the rules to create new logs.
--cleanup=CLEANUP
 Specifies the number of days to keep log entries and deletes the rest.

FAQ

The graph doesn't show in the Django admin.

If you don't have settings.DEBUG=True, the media will not be served by Django. You should copy the media directory to your own media directory and set LOGDB_MEDIA_ROOT and LOGDB_MEDIA_URL accordingly.

Example:

LOGDB_MEDIA_ROOT = '/myproject/media/djanglogdb/'
LOGDB_MEDIA_URL = '/media/djanglogdb/'

Instead of copying, you can also use Apache's Alias directive to serve the static files, as you probably also did for Django's own media files. It is explained here: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/deployment/modwsgi/#serving-media-files This boils down to adding the following line to your VirtualHost entry:

Alias <your LOGDB_MEDIA_URL setting> <path to django-logdb media dir>

Example:

Alias /admin/djangologdb/media/ /myproject/eggs/django_logdb-0.9.5-py2.6.egg/djangologdb/media/
The Django admin pages for django-logdb load very slow.
If you have a lot of datapoints in the graph, it executes a lot of queries. This can take some time. You should decrease the time period or increase the interval. By default, the last 30 days with an interval of 1 day is used, resulting in 30 datapoints. See the settings LOGDB_HISTORY_DAYS and LOGDB_INTERVAL.
Why is there 1 query executed for each datapoint?
Django does not (yet) allow to group by certain date information. Even though a timestamp is stored in the database, there is no way to tell the Django ORM to group by day, by hour, etc. The solution I used was to filter/limit the results needed to construct 1 datapoint.
When I run my tests, I see ERROR:djangologdb.middleware [...]

When you run, for example, the testproject, the configuration is set so that any error is also displayed on sys.stderr. As you you'll see, the tests all succeed but the exceptions that are tested are just displayed in the console. This is not an error!

You can disable this behaviour by disabling logging to the console for your test configuration (ie. remove the handler).

Why are the templates extending a local version of the Django base templates?
This is done for optimal flexibility regarding custom templates. Skins like Grappelli override a lot of templates and sometimes you want to be able to change and use the base template in django-logdb and change some specifics in the django-logdb template itself without copying all the base template stuff.

Test project

The testproject is a sample installation of django-logdb. It provides a settings file for Django 1.1 and Django 1.2, just to run it.

In the directory below the testproject, create a virtual environment:

$ virtualenv .
$ source bin/activate

Install Django and run the internal server using one of the setting files for your Django version.

$ bin/python bin/pip install django $ bin/python bin/django-admin.py runserver --settings=testproject.settings_django_1_1

Thanks

To the various people that helped making this project better and better:

  • Maciek Szczesniak (vvarp)
  • Victor van den Elzen

Thanks to David Cramer for his work on django-db-log (http://github.com/dcramer/django-db-log/) on which this package was based.