Sentry provides you with a generic interface to view and interact with your error logs. By default, it will catch any exception thrown by Django and store it in a database. With this it allows you to interact and view near real-time information to discover issues and more easily trace them in your application.

• Note: Sentry has only been tested under a PostgreSQL environment.

• Django >= 1.2 (to use a secondary database to store error logs)
• django-indexer (stores metadata indexes)
• django-paging
• pygooglechart (to generate optional error reports)

If you use South migrations, simply run:

python manage.py migrate sentry

If you don't use South, then start.

The easiest way to install the package is via pip:

pip install django-sentry --upgrade

OR, if you're not quite on the same page (work on that), with setuptools:

easy_install django-sentry

Once installed, update your settings.py and add sentry, sentry.client, indexer, and paging to INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',

    # don't forget to add the dependancies!
    'indexer',
    'paging',
    'sentry',
    'sentry.client',
    ...
)

Finally, run python manage.py syncdb to create the database tables.

(If you use South, you'll need to use python manage.py migrate sentry)

To configure Sentry for use in a multi-server environment, first you'll want to configure your Sentry server (not your application):

INSTALLED_APPS = [
  ...
  'indexer',
  'paging',
  'sentry',
  'sentry.client',
]

SENTRY_KEY = '0123456789abcde'

And on each of your application servers, specify the URL of the Sentry server, add sentry.client to INSTALLED_APPS, and specify the same key used in your Sentry server's settings:

# This should be the absolute URI of sentries store view
SENTRY_REMOTE_URL = 'http://your.sentry.server/sentry/store/'

INSTALLED_APPS = [
  ...
  'sentry.client',
]

SENTRY_KEY = '0123456789abcde'

You may also specify an alternative timeout to the default (which is 5 seconds) for all outgoing logging requests:

SENTRY_REMOTE_TIMEOUT = 5

Several options exist to configure django-sentry via your settings.py:

Enable catching of 404 errors in the logs. Default value is False:

SENTRY_CATCH_404_ERRORS = True

You can skip other custom exception types by adding a skip_sentry = True attribute to them.

Use a secondary database to store error logs. This is useful if you have several websites and want to aggregate error logs onto one database server:

# This should correspond to a key in your DATABASES setting
SENTRY_DATABASE_USING = 'default'

You should also enable the SentryRouter to avoid things like extraneous table creation:

DATABASE_ROUTERS = [
    'sentry.routers.SentryRouter',
    ...
]

Enabling this setting will turn off automatic database logging within the exception handler, and instead send all exceptions to the named logger sentry. Use this in conjuction with sentry.client.handlers.SentryHandler or your own handler to tweak how logging is dealt with.

A good example use case for this, is if you want to write to something like a syslog ahead of time, and later process that into the database with another tool.

django-sentry supports the ability to directly tie into the logging module. To use it simply add SentryHandler to your logger:

import logging
from sentry.client.handlers import SentryHandler

logging.getLogger().addHandler(SentryHandler())

# Add StreamHandler to sentry's default so you can catch missed exceptions
logging.getLogger('sentry').addHandler(logging.StreamHandler())

You can also use the exc_info and extra=dict(url=foo) arguments on your log methods. This will store the appropriate information and allow django-sentry to render it based on that information:

logging.error('There was some crazy error', exc_info=sys.exc_info(), extra={'url': request.build_absolute_uri()})

Set up a viewer server (or use your existing application server) and add sentry to your INSTALLED_APPS and your included URLs:

# urls.py
urlpatterns = patterns('',
    (r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
    (r'^sentry/', include('sentry.urls')),
)

Now enjoy your beautiful new error tracking at /sentry/.

For the technical, here's some further docs:

If you wish to access these within your own views and models, you may do so via the standard model API:

from sentry.models import Message, GroupedMessage

# Pull the last 10 unresolved errors.
GroupedMessage.objects.filter(status=0).order_by('-last_seen')[0:10]

You can also record errors outside of handler if you want:

from sentry.client.base import SentryClient

try:
    ...
except Exception, exc:
    SentryClient.create_from_exception(exc, [url=None, view=None])

If you wish to log normal messages (useful for non-logging integration):

from sentry.client.base import SentryClient
import logging

SentryClient.create_from_text('Message Message'[, level=logging.WARNING, url=None])

Both the url and level parameters are optional. level should be one of the following:

• logging.DEBUG
• logging.INFO
• logging.WARNING
• logging.ERROR
• logging.FATAL

If you have a custom exception class, similar to Http404, or something else you don't want to log, you can also add skip_sentry = True to your exception class or instance, and sentry will simply ignore the error.

• sentry-client will automatically integrate with django-idmapper.
• sentry-client supports South migrations.
• The fact that the admin shows large quantities of results, even if there aren't, is not a bug. This is an efficiency hack on top of Django.