django-sentry

Sentry provides you with a generic interface to view and interact with your error logs. By default, it will catch any exception thrown by Django and store it in a database. With this it allows you to interact and view near real-time information to discover issues and more easily trace them in your application.

• Note: Sentry has only been tested under a PostgreSQL environment.

Screenshot

Requirements

• Django >= 1.2 (to use a secondary database to store error logs)
• django-indexer (stores metadata indexes)
• django-paging
• pygooglechart (to generate optional error reports)

Upgrading

If you use South migrations, simply run:

python manage.py migrate sentry

If you don't use South, then start.

Install

The easiest way to install the package is via pip:

pip install django-sentry --upgrade

OR, if you're not quite on the same page (work on that), with setuptools:

easy_install django-sentry

Once installed, update your settings.py and add sentry, sentry.client, indexer, and paging to INSTALLED_APPS:

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

    # don't forget to add the dependancies!
    'indexer',
    'paging',
    'sentry',
    'sentry.client',
    ...
)

Finally, run python manage.py syncdb to create the database tables.

(If you use South, you'll need to use python manage.py migrate sentry)

Multi-server configuration

To configure Sentry for use in a multi-server environment, first you'll want to configure your Sentry server (not your application):

INSTALLED_APPS = [
  ...
  'indexer',
  'paging',
  'sentry',
  'sentry.client',
]

SENTRY_KEY = '0123456789abcde'

And on each of your application servers, specify the URL of the Sentry server, add sentry.client to INSTALLED_APPS, and specify the same key used in your Sentry server's settings:

# This should be the absolute URI of sentries store view
SENTRY_REMOTE_URL = 'http://your.sentry.server/sentry/store/'

INSTALLED_APPS = [
  ...
  'sentry.client',
]

SENTRY_KEY = '0123456789abcde'

You may also specify an alternative timeout to the default (which is 5 seconds) for all outgoing logging requests:

SENTRY_REMOTE_TIMEOUT = 5

Sentry also allows you to support high availability by pushing to multiple servers:

SENTRY_REMOTE_URL = ['http://server1/sentry/store/', 'http://server2/sentry/store/']

Other configuration options

Several options exist to configure django-sentry via your settings.py:

SENTRY_ADMINS

On smaller sites you may wish to enable throttled emails, we recommend doing this by first removing the ADMINS setting in Django, and adding in SENTRY_ADMINS:

ADMINS = ()
SENTRY_ADMINS = ('root@localhost',)

This will send out a notification the first time an error is seen, and the first time an error is seen after it has been resolved.

SENTRY_CATCH_404_ERRORS

Enable catching of 404 errors in the logs. Default value is False:

SENTRY_CATCH_404_ERRORS = True

You can skip other custom exception types by adding a skip_sentry = True attribute to them.

SENTRY_DATABASE_USING

Use a secondary database to store error logs. This is useful if you have several websites and want to aggregate error logs onto one database server:

# This should correspond to a key in your DATABASES setting
SENTRY_DATABASE_USING = 'default'

You should also enable the SentryRouter to avoid things like extraneous table creation:

DATABASE_ROUTERS = [
        'sentry.routers.SentryRouter',
        ...
]

Note

This functionality REQUIRES Django 1.2.

Integration with logging

django-sentry supports the ability to directly tie into the logging module. To use it simply add SentryHandler to your logger:

import logging
from sentry.client.handlers import SentryHandler

logging.getLogger().addHandler(SentryHandler())

# Add StreamHandler to sentry's default so you can catch missed exceptions
logging.getLogger('sentry').addHandler(logging.StreamHandler())

You can also use the exc_info and extra=dict(url=foo) arguments on your log methods. This will store the appropriate information and allow django-sentry to render it based on that information:

logging.error('There was some crazy error', exc_info=sys.exc_info(), extra={'url': request.build_absolute_uri()})

Any additional information you pass into the extra clause will also be stored as meta information with the event. As long as the key name is not reserved (url) and not private (_foo) it will be displayed on the Sentry dashboard.

SENTRY_TESTING

Enabling this setting allows the testing of Sentry exception handler even if Django DEBUG is enabled.

Default value is False

Note

Normally when Django DEBUG is enabled the Sentry exception handler is immediately skipped

SENTRY_NAME

This will override the server_name value for this installation. Defaults to socket.get_hostname().

Usage

Set up a viewer server (or use your existing application server) and add sentry to your INSTALLED_APPS and your included URLs:

# urls.py
urlpatterns = patterns('',
    (r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
    (r'^sentry/', include('sentry.urls')),
)

Now enjoy your beautiful new error tracking at /sentry/.

API

For the technical, here's some further docs:

If you wish to access these within your own views and models, you may do so via the standard model API:

from sentry.models import Message, GroupedMessage

# Pull the last 10 unresolved errors.
GroupedMessage.objects.filter(status=0).order_by('-last_seen')[0:10]

You can also record errors outside of handler if you want:

from sentry.client.base import SentryClient

try:
        ...
except Exception, exc:
        SentryClient.create_from_exception([url=None, view=None])

If you wish to log normal messages (useful for non-logging integration):

from sentry.client.base import SentryClient
import logging

SentryClient.create_from_text('Message Message'[, level=logging.WARNING, url=None])

Both the url and level parameters are optional. level should be one of the following:

• logging.DEBUG
• logging.INFO
• logging.WARNING
• logging.ERROR
• logging.FATAL

If you have a custom exception class, similar to Http404, or something else you don't want to log, you can also add skip_sentry = True to your exception class or instance, and sentry will simply ignore the error.

Notes

• sentry-client will automatically integrate with django-idmapper.
• sentry-client supports South migrations.
• The fact that the admin shows large quantities of results, even if there aren't, is not a bug. This is an efficiency hack on top of Django.