Django comes with many great built-in features, logging is one of them. Pre-configured logging setups that vary between development (debug mode) and production environments. Easy integration to send you emails on errors, out-of-the-box support for various settings as log levels and log format. But how do you setup colorized logging, JSON logging and unified logging formats between Celery and Django, for example? Examples were hard to find and documentation was tricky to understand. Therefore, this blog post will walk through an opinionated setup on Django development and production logging using Structlog.

Django provides session support out-of-the-box and stores sessions in the django_session database table. Django leaves it up to the project maintainers to purge sessions in their Django project. This means that if it’s not done on a regular basis the table grows infinitely. However, they provide a simple command called clearsessions for it. Using it within a Celery task in a cron schedule resolves any long-term storage issues with large tables for sessions. The below solution requires both Celery for the task and Celery-beat for the cron schedule.

Celery is a python project used for asynchronous job processing and task scheduling in web applications or distributed systems. It is very commonly used together with Django, Celery as the asynchronous job processor and Django as the web framework. Celery has great documentation on how to use it, deploy it and integrate it with Django. However, monitoring is less covered - this is what this blog post aims to do. There is a great Prometheus exporter for Celery that has dashboards and alerts that come with them.

As good as a framework that Django is, the default method of sending an email when getting an error leave much to be desired. The database or cache acting flaky? Expect 1000s of emails depicting that error, which usually does not provide enough details for you to understand the issue. Luckily, Sentry, which is an error tracking and monitoring platform provides an out-of-the-box integration for Django and Celery.