Gunicorn Django Canonical Logs

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gunicorn-django-canonical-logs provides extensible canonical log lines for Gunicorn/Django applications.

Table of Contents

• Caveats
• Installation
• Usage
• Overview
  • Example logs
  • Default intstrumenters
    • Request intstrumenter
    • Exception intstrumenter
    • Database intstrument
    • Saturation intstrument
  • Default monitors
    • Saturation monitor
    • Timeout monitor
  • Extending gunicorn-django-canonical-logs
    • Application-specific context
    • Application-specific timing
    • Custom instrumenters
• License

Caveats

This is alpha software. It has not (yet!) been battle-tested and does several risky things worth highlighting:

• Overrides Django settings to include custom middleware to gather request/response context
• Modifies Django template rendering and database query execution to gather template exception/database query context
• Runs a separate timeout thread for every request to gather timeout context
• Leverages shared memory between the Gunicorn arbiter and workers to gather saturation context
  • There's currently no cleanup and processes that receive SIGKILL will leak memory

Installation

pip install gunicorn-django-canonical-logs

Usage

Add the following to your Gunicorn configuration file:

from gunicorn_django_canonical_logs.glogging import Logger
from gunicorn_django_canonical_logs.gunicorn_hooks import *  # register Gunicorn hooks and instrumenters

accesslog = "-"
logger_class = Logger

Important

Only sync Gunicorn worker types are supported

Tip

Set GUNICORN_PRESERVE_EXISTING_LOGGER=1 in the environment to preserve existing gunicorn access logs in addition to canonical logs

Partial failure

This library also includes an @on_error(return_value=...) decorator that will emit a partial_failure event correlated to the request log via req_id with exception context. See tests/server/app.py:partial_failure for an example.

The motivation is that some failure is expected and we'd prefer to return a degraded experience in some cases. In the event that's necessary, correlated logs provide the opportunity to monitor the frequency and type of errors observed.

Overview

The goal is to enhance obersvability by providing reasonable defaults and extensibility to answer two questions:

• If a request was processed, what did it do?
• If a request timed out, what had it done and what was it doing?

A request will generate exactly one of these two event_types:

• request - the worker process was able to successfully process the request and return a response
• timeout - the worker process timed out before returning a response
  • timeout events include a timeout_loc/timeout_cause_loc

Example logs

Examples can be generated from the app used for integration testing:

• cd tests/server
• DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=settings python app.py migrate
• DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=settings gunicorn -c gunicorn_config.py app

And then, from another shell:

• curl http://localhost:8080/db_queries/
• curl http://localhost:8080/rude_sleep/?duration=10

Request events

200 response from Django with DB queries

event_type="request"
req_method="GET"
req_path="/db_queries/"
req_referrer="localhost:8080"
req_user_agent="curl/7.88.1"
resp_view="app.db_queries"
resp_time="0.016"
resp_cpu_time="0.006"
resp_status="200"
db_queries="3"
db_time="0.007"
db_dup_queries="2"
db_dup_time="0.003"
g_w_count="1"
g_w_active="0"
g_backlog="0"

404 response from Django

event_type="request"
req_method="GET"
req_path="/does-no-exist/"
req_referrer="-"
req_user_agent="curl/7.88.1"
resp_view="-"
resp_time="0.000"
resp_cpu_time="0.000"
resp_status="404"
g_w_count="1"
g_w_active="0"
g_backlog="0"

500 response from Django

event_type="request"
req_method="GET"
req_path="/view_exception/"
req_referrer="-"
req_user_agent="curl/7.88.1"
exc_type="MyError"
exc_msg="Oh noes!"
exc_loc="app.py:38:view_exception"
exc_cause_loc="app.py:30:func_that_throws"
resp_view="app.view_exception"
resp_time="0.005"
resp_cpu_time="0.003"
resp_status="500"
g_w_count="1"
g_w_active="0"
g_backlog="0"
app_key="val"

200 response from Whitenoise (static assets)

event_type="request"
req_method="GET"
req_path="/static/foo.txt"
req_referrer="localhost:8080"
req_user_agent="curl/7.88.1"
resp_status="200"
g_w_count="1"
g_w_active="0"
g_backlog="0"

Timeout events

timeout

event_type="timeout"
req_method="GET"
req_path="/rude_sleep/"
req_referrer="localhost:8080"
req_user_agent="curl/7.88.1"
resp_time="0.8"
timeout_loc="gunicorn_django_canonical_logs/instrumenters/request.py:25:context_middleware"
timeout_cause_loc="app.py:103:simulate_blocking_and_ignoring_signals"
g_w_count="1"
g_w_active="0"
g_backlog="0"

Partial failure events

partial failure

event_type="partial_failure"
req_id="944e3dc1-14df-4dcd-aafe-00deea240c8b"
exc_type="MyError"
exc_msg="Oh noes!"
exc_loc="app.py:63:will_throw"
exc_cause_loc="app.py:31:func_that_throws"

event_type="request"
req_id="944e3dc1-14df-4dcd-aafe-00deea240c8b"
req_method="GET" req_path="/partial_failure/"
req_referrer="-"
req_user_agent="curl/7.88.1"
resp_view="app.partial_failure"
resp_time="0.006"
resp_cpu_time="0.005"
resp_status="200"
g_w_count="1"
g_w_active="0"
g_backlog="0"

Default instrumenters

Request instrumenter

• req_method (string) - HTTP method (e.g. GET/POST)
• req_path (string) - URL path
• req_referer (string) - Referrer HTTP header
• req_user_agent (string) - User-Agent HTTP header
• resp_time (float) - wall time spent processing the request (in seconds)
• resp_view (string) - Django view that generated the response
• resp_cpu_time (float) - CPU time (i.e. ignoring sleep/wait) spent processing the request (in seconds)
• resp_status (int) - HTTP status code of the response

Exception instrumenter

• exc_type (string) - type of the exception
• exc_message (string) - exception message
• exc_loc (string) - {module}:{line_number}:{name} of the top of the stack (i.e. the last place the exception could've been handled)
• exc_cause_loc (string) - {module}:{line_number}:{name} of the frame that threw the exception
• exc_template (string) - {template_name}:{line_number} (if raised during template rendering)

NB There's some subtlety in how loc/cause_loc work; they attempt to provide application-relevant info by ignoring frames in library code if application frames are available.

Database instrumenter

• db_queries (int) - total number of queries executed
• db_time (float) - total time spent executing queries (in seconds)
• db_dup_queries (int) - total number of non-unique queries; could indicate N+1 issues
• db_dup_time (float) - total time spent executing non-unique queries (in seconds); could indicate N+1 issues

Saturation instrumenter

• g_w_count (int) - total number of Gunicorn workers
• g_w_active (int) - number of active Gunicorn workers
• g_w_backlog (int) - number of queued requests

NB These values are sampled about once a second, and represent a snapshot. To derive useful data, average the values over time.

Default monitors

Saturation monitor

The saturation monitor samples and aggregates Gunicorn data; it provides data on the current number of active/idle workers as well as the number of queued requests that have not been assigned to a worker.

Timeout monitor

The timeout monitor wakes up slightly before the Gunicorn timeout in order to emit stack frame and instrumenter data before Gunicorn recycles the worker.

Extending gunicorn-django-canonical-logs

Application-specific context

from anywhere in your application, use

from gunicorn_django_canonical_logs import Context

Context.set("custom", "my_value")

This would add app_custom="my_value" to the log for the current request; context is cleared between requests.

Application-specific timing

from anywhere in your application, use

from gunicorn_django_canonical_logs import Context

with Context.time("custom"):
    do_thing_that_takes_time()

This would add app_custom_time="{wall time in seconds}" to the log for the current request based on the execution time of do_thing_that_takes_time(); multiple timings using the same key are summed.

Custom instrumenters

from gunicorn_django_canonical_logs import Context, register_instrumenter

@register_instrumenter
class MyInstrumenter:
    def setup(self):
        pass  # called once after forking a Gunicorn worker

    def call(self, request, response, environ):
        pass  # called every time an event is emitted

Important

The application must import the instrumenter for it to register itself.

License

gunicorn-django-canonical-logs is distributed under the terms of the MIT license.