event, exception logging for django

Question

Ok, here is my confusion/problem:

1. I develop in localhost and there you could raise exceptions and could see the logs in command line easily.
2. Then I deploy the code on test, stage and production server, that is where the problem begins, it is not easy to see logs or debug errors and exceptions. For normal errors I guess django-toolbar could be enabled, but I do get some silent exceptions which dont crash but the process manipulates to failure because of that. For example, I have payment integration, and few days ago the payments were failing on return (callback) on our site, but nothing was crashing, just that payment process failed message was coming, but the payment gateway vendor was working fine, then I had to look for some failure instances which could lead to this problem and figured out that one db save operation was not saving because the variable was not there.

Now my question, is Sentry (https://github.com/getsentry/sentry) an answer for that? Or is there any other option for this?

Please do ask if any further clarification is needed for my requirement.

Answer 1

Sentry is an option, but honestly is too limited (I tried it a month ago or so), it's intended to track exceptions, but in the real world we should track important informations and events too. If you didn't setup an application logging, I suggest you to do it, by following this example.

In my app I defined several loggers, for different purposes, the python logging configuration via dictionary (the one used by Django), is very powerful and you have a full control over how things get logged, for example you can write logs to a file, to a database, send an email, call a third party api or whatever. If your app is running in a load balanced environment (so you have several machines running your app), you can use services like Loggly to aggregate the logs coming from your instances in a single place (and since it uses RSYSLOG, it aggregates not only your Django app logs, but also all the logs of your underlying OS). I suggest you to use also New Relic, which keeps track of a lot of stuff automatically: query executed and time, template loading time, errors and a lot of other useful statistics.