django-watchman exposes a status endpoint for your backing services like databases, caches, etc.
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django-watchman exposes a status endpoint for your backing services like
databases, caches, etc.
The full documentation is at http://django-watchman.rtfd.org.
We're in love with django-watchman. External monitoring is a vital part of our service offering. Using django-watchman we can introspect the infrastructure of an application via a secure URL. It's very well written and easy to extend. We've recommended it to many of our clients already.
— Hany Fahim, CEO, VM Farms <https://vmfarms.com/>_.
Install django-watchman::
pip install django-watchman
Add watchman to your INSTALLED_APPS setting like this::
INSTALLED_APPS = (
…
‘watchman’,
)
Include the watchman URLconf in your project urls.py like this::
re_path(r’^watchman/', include(‘watchman.urls’)),
Start the development server and visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/watchman/ to
get a JSON response of your backing service statuses::
{
“databases”: [
{
“default”: {
“ok”: true
}
}
],
“caches”: [
{
“default”: {
“ok”: true
}
}
],
“storage”: {“ok”: true}
}
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Human-friendly dashboard
Visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/watchman/dashboard/ to get a human-friendly HTML
representation of all of your watchman checks.
Token based authentication
If you want to protect the status endpoint, you can use the WATCHMAN_TOKENS setting.
This is a comma-separated list of tokens.
When this setting is added, you must pass one of the tokens in as the watchman-token GET parameter::
GET http://127.0.0.1:8000/watchman/?watchman-token=:token
Or by setting the Authorization: WATCHMAN-TOKEN header on the request::
curl -X GET -H "Authorization: WATCHMAN-TOKEN Token=\":token\"" http://127.0.0.1:8000/watchman/
If you want to change the token name, you can set the WATCHMAN_TOKEN_NAME.
The value of this setting will be the GET parameter that you must pass in::
WATCHMAN_TOKEN_NAME = 'custom-token-name'
GET http://127.0.0.1:8000/watchman/?custom-token-name=:token
DEPRECATION WARNING: WATCHMAN_TOKEN was replaced by the WATCHMAN_TOKENS setting to support multiple authentication tokens in django-watchman 0.11.
It will continue to work until it’s removed in django-watchman 1.0.
Custom authentication/authorization
If you want to protect the status endpoint with a customized
authentication/authorization decorator, you can add WATCHMAN_AUTH_DECORATOR
to your settings. This needs to be a dotted-path to a decorator, and defaults
to watchman.decorators.token_required::
WATCHMAN_AUTH_DECORATOR = 'django.contrib.admin.views.decorators.staff_member_required'
Note that the token_required decorator does not protect a view unless
WATCHMAN_TOKENS is set in settings.
Custom checks
django-watchman allows you to customize the checks which are run by modifying
the WATCHMAN_CHECKS setting. In settings.py::
WATCHMAN_CHECKS = (
'module.path.to.callable',
'another.module.path.to.callable',
)
You can also import the watchman.constants to include the DEFAULT_CHECKS and PAID_CHECKS in your settings.py::
from watchman import constants as watchman_constants
WATCHMAN_CHECKS = watchman_constants.DEFAULT_CHECKS + (‘module.path.to.callable’, )
Checks take no arguments, and must return a dict whose keys are applied to the JSON response.
Use the watchman.decorators.check decorator to capture exceptions::
from watchman.decorators import check
def custom_check():
return {"custom_check": _custom_check()}
@check
def _custom_check():
return {"ok": True, "extra_info": "if helpful"}
In the absence of any checks, a 404 is thrown, which is then handled by the
json_view decorator.
Run a subset of available checks
A subset of checks may be run, by passing ?check=module.path.to.callable&check=...
in the request URL. Only the callables given in the querystring which are also
in WATCHMAN_CHECKS should be run, eg::
curl -XGET http://127.0.0.1:8080/watchman/?check=watchman.checks.caches
Skip specific checks
You can skip any number of checks, by passing ?skip=module.path.to.callable&skip=...
in the request URL. Only the checks in WATCHMAN_CHECKS which are not in the
querystring should be run, eg::
curl -XGET http://127.0.0.1:8080/watchman/?skip=watchman.checks.email
Check a subset of databases or caches
If your application has a large number of databases or caches configured,
watchman may open too many connections as it checks each database or cache.
You can set the WATCHMAN_DATABASES or WATCHMAN_CACHES settings in order
to override the default set of databases and caches to be monitored.
Ping
If you want to simply check that your application is running and able to handle
requests, you can call ping:
GET http://127.0.0.1:8000/watchman/ping/
It will return the text pong with a 200 status code. Calling this doesn’t
run any of the checks.
Bare status view
If you would like a “bare” status view (one that doesn’t report any details,
just HTTP 200 if checks pass, and HTTP 500 if any checks fail), you
can use the bare_status view by putting the following into urls.py::
import watchman.views
# ...
re_path(r'^status/?$', watchman.views.bare_status),
Django management command
You can also run your checks without starting the webserver and making requests.
This can be useful for testing your configuration before enabling a server,
checking configuration on worker servers, etc. Run the management command like so::
python manage.py watchman
By default, successful checks will not print any output. If all checks pass
successfully, the exit code will be 0. If a check fails, the exit code will
be 1, and the error message including stack trace will be printed to stderr.
If you’d like to see output for successful checks as well, set verbosity to
2 or higher::
python manage.py watchman -v 2
{"storage": {"ok": true}}
{"caches": [{"default": {"ok": true}}]}
{"databases": [{"default": {"ok": true}}]}
If you’d like to run a subset of checks, use -c and a comma-separated list
of python module paths::
python manage.py watchman -c watchman.checks.caches,watchman.checks.databases -v 2
{"caches": [{"default": {"ok": true}}]}
{"databases": [{"default": {"ok": true}}]}
If you’d like to skip certain checks, use -s and a comma-separated list of
python module paths::
python manage.py watchman -s watchman.checks.caches,watchman.checks.databases -v 2
{"storage": {"ok": true}}
Use -h to see a full list of options::
python manage.py watchman -h
X-Watchman-Version response header
Watchman can return the version of watchman which is running to help you keep
track of whether or not your sites are using an up-to-date version. This is
disabled by default to prevent any unintended information leakage for websites
without authentication. To enable, update the EXPOSE_WATCHMAN_VERSION
setting::
EXPOSE_WATCHMAN_VERSION = True
Custom response code
By default, watchman will return a 500 HTTP response code, even if there’s a
failing check. You can specify a different response code for failing checks
using the WATCHMAN_ERROR_CODE setting::
WATCHMAN_ERROR_CODE = 200
Logging
watchman includes log messages using a logger called watchman.
You can configure this by configuring the LOGGING section of your Django
settings file.
Here is a simple example that would log to the console::
LOGGING = {
'version': 1,
'disable_existing_loggers': False,
'handlers': {
'console': {
'class': 'logging.StreamHandler',
},
},
'loggers': {
'watchman': {
'handlers': ['console'],
'level': 'DEBUG',
},
},
}
More information is available in the Django documentation <https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.0/topics/logging/#configuring-logging]>_.
APM (Datadog, New Relic)
If you’re using APM and watchman is being often hit for health checks (such as an ELB on
AWS), you will find some stats based on averages will be affected (average transaction
time, apdex, etc):
You can disable APM instrumentation for watchman by using the WATCHMAN_DISABLE_APM
setting::
WATCHMAN_DISABLE_APM = True
This currently supports the following agents:
Please open an issue if there’s another APM you use which is being affected.
caches
For each cache in django.conf.settings.CACHES:
databases
For each database in django.conf.settings.DATABASES:
connections[database].introspection.table_names()Send a test email to [email protected] using django.core.mail.send_mail.
If you’re using a 3rd party mail provider, this check could end up costing you
money, depending how aggressive you are with your monitoring. For this reason,
this check is not enabled by default.
For reference, if you were using Mandrill, and hitting your watchman endpoint
once per minute, this would cost you ~$5.60/month.
Custom Settings
WATCHMAN_EMAIL_SENDER (default: [email protected]): Specify an email to be the sender of the test emailWATCHMAN_EMAIL_RECIPIENTS (default: [[email protected]]): Specify a list of email addresses to send the test emailWATCHMAN_EMAIL_HEADERS (default: {}): Specify a dict of custom headers to be added to the test emailstorage
Using django.core.files.storage.default_storage:
By default the test file gets written on the root of the django MEDIA_ROOT. If for whatever reasons this path is not writable by the user that runs the application you can override it by setting WATCHMAN_STORAGE_PATH to a specific path.
Remember that this must be within the MEDIA_ROOT, which by default is your project root. In settings.py::
WATCHMAN_STORAGE_PATH = “/path_to_your_app/foo/bar/”
If the MEDIA_ROOT is already defined::
from os.path import join as joinpath
WATCHMAN_STORAGE_PATH = joinpath(MEDIA_ROOT, “foo/bar”)
Default checks
By default, django-watchman will run checks against your databases
(watchman.checks.databases), caches (watchman.checks.caches), and
storage (watchman.checks.storage).
Paid checks
Paid checks are checks which may cost you money if they are run regularly.
Currently there is only one “paid” check - watchman.checks.email. Many
times email is sent using managed services like SendGrid or Mailgun. You can
enable it by setting the WATCHMAN_ENABLE_PAID_CHECKS to True, or by
overriding the WATCHMAN_CHECKS setting.
A sample project is available along with a Dockerfile to make it easy to try
out django-watchman. It includes examples of how to write simple custom checks.
One of the custom checks will always fail, so if you want to see what responses
look like with 100% succeeding checks, add ?skip=sample_project.checks.fail_custom_check
Requirements
Docker <https://www.docker.com/get-docker>Instructions
make run