Django Correlation ID

Logging is important. Anyone who has had a call at 3am to say the siteis down knows this. Without quality logging it is almost impossible towork out what on earth is happening.

The more you log, the harder it is to track down exactly what theeffects of a particular request are. Enter Django Correlation ID.Incoming requests are assigned a unique identifier. This can eitherhappen in your public facing web server (e.g. nginx) or be appliedby Django itself.

This correlation id (also known as request id) is then availablethrough the Django request/response cycle and may be automaticallyincluded in all log messages. That way, you can easily link all logmessages that relate to the same request:

2018-10-01T08:18:39.86+00:00 correlation_id=2433d5d4-27a3-4889-b14b-107a131368a3 Call to plug from cpoint=12018-10-01T08:18:39.90+00:00 correlation_id=72fbd7dd-a0ba-4f92-9ed0-0db358338e86 Call to state by cpoint=2 with {'state': {'B': 'idle', 'A': 'on_charge'}}2018-10-01T08:18:39.92+00:00 correlation_id=2433d5d4-27a3-4889-b14b-107a131368a3 Ended rental=7 customer="John Smith" on plug

In this example, we can see that the first and the third log messagesare tied to the same request, while the second message relates to adistinct request.

In addition to these logs, django-cid can include the correlationid:

• in all SQL queries (as a comment);
• in rendered templates;
• as a header in the HTTP response generated by Django;
• and possibly anywhere by using the API of django-cid, forexample as an HTTP header on a request to another internal system ofyours, which is especially useful in service-oriented architecture.

Documentation can be found at: https://django-correlation-id.readthedocs.org/

Sources are on GitHub: https://github.com/Polyconseil/django-cid

Supported versions

We currently support Python >= 3.6 and Django >= 2.2.

Other versions may work but are not supported.