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How to configure an external logging service

Your Test and Live servers have their own runtime logs, available from the application's dashboard in the Control Panel.

These logs are provided as a convenience. However they are limited to only the last 1000 lines of output and are not intended to be a comprehensive logging system for production purposes.

For that we recommend subscribing to a dedicated logging service, of which there are several, and configuring your application to route different kinds of logs (access, errors and so on) to different destinations, so you can use them more effectively.

Example using LogDNA​

This document will show you how to set up logging using the popular LogDNA service. Using other services the principle will be the same, with only some minor differences.

If you don't already have a LogDNA account, visit https://logdna.com and register for a free account. LogDNA will provide you with an ingestion key.

Set your application up locally. We'll assume that you are using a standard Divio application using Aldryn Django.

Install the logdna Python library​

You will need to add logdna to its requirements (strongly recommended: pin it to a particular version) and rebuild the application (docker-compose build).

This package provides a new logging handler (logdna.LogDNAHandler) that will forward log messages to LogDNA.

Amend the LOGGING configuration​

In Aldryn Django's aldryn.config.py, you will find the default logging configuration, that defines a LOGGING dictionary with several keys.

First, we'll add the new logging handler to this.

LOGGING["handlers"]["logdna"] = {
    'class': 'logdna.LogDNAHandler',
    'key': '<insert your ingestion key here>',
    'options': {
        'hostname': 'your-website-name',
        'index_meta': True
    }
}

What we have done here is added the new handler, logdna (the name doesn't actually matter) as a key to the dictionary.

Next, we need to configure the existing loggers, that actually produce the logs, to use the handler. In this example, we will append the logdna handler to the configuration of:

  • the unnamed root logger ""
  • the django logger
  • the django.request logger
LOGGING["loggers"][""]['handlers'].append('logdna')
LOGGING["loggers"]["django"]['handlers'].append('logdna')
LOGGING["loggers"]["django.request"]['handlers'].append('logdna')

More information about configuring Django logging can be found in Django's logging documentation.

Other logging options​

The above is just a very basic example of using external logging. We recommend becoming familiar with Django's logging framework and configuring it to send the most useful logs for your purposes.

Sentry​

Sentry is another popular service; Aldryn Django is Sentry-aware and requires only the provision of a SENTRY_DSN environment variable to configure integration with Sentry.