django_status is a status dashboard that allows you to keep track of various properties of your site. Uses cases include monitoring the age of editorial content, making sure mailer queues aren't full for too long, making sure a task queue remains below a certain size, or anything else you can think of.

Monitors

django_status defines the concept of monitors which monitor values and return a status - either fine, warning, or problem. Specifically, django_status.models.STATUS.FINE, django_status.models.STATUS.WARNING, or django_status.models.STATUS.PROBLEM. A dashboard can be displayed, showing the state of all monitors.

Using django_status generally means subclassing django_status.models.Montior and overriding the status function, returning something from django_status.models.STATUS as described above. See the Installation and Usage section for more.

You probably want to override the report method, too. The dashboard will show the output of report() for each monitor, which should just reuturn a string elaborating on the meaning of the result of status(). For example:

def report(self):
    STATUS = django_status.models.STATUS
    return {
        STATUS.FINE: "Everything's okay.",
        STATUS.WARNING: "The server is a little warm.",
        STATUS.PROBLEM: "The server is on fire.",
    }[self.status()]

Notifications

Email notifications can be sent out for warning or problem statuses. Each Monitor has a notifees many-to-many field to django.contrib.auth.models.User, and the notifees of a monitor will receive its notification emails. Two management commands are provided: status_send_digest and status_send_instant. The former sends a digest to each user with any warning or problem monitors (you might want to have cron run this daily or weekly); the latter sends a notification immediately, but only for warning or problem monitors with notify_type set to django_status.models.NOTIFY.INSTANT (you might want to have cron run this every five minutes).

status_send_digest is smart enough not to spam your inbox - once it has sent an instant notification for a given monitor M, it won't send notifications for M again until it either becomes fine and then goes back to warning or problem, or until M.instant_notification_delay seconds have elapsed since the last notification for M. Note that this check only occurs when status_send_instant is run, and so isn't necessarily appropriate for monitors whose statuses might change with high frequency.

By default, only User objects with is_staff == True will be available as notifees. This seems like the right choice for most use cases (and saves you searching through your entire user table when setting up a monitor); if this doesn't work for you, you can override the notifees field in your subclass.

Notifications will be sent from settings.django_STATUS_FROM_EMAIL, defaulting to status@<your domain>.

Installation and Usage

• Check out this repo to somewhere on your PYTHONPATH.

• Add 'django_status' to settings.INSTALLED_APPS.

• Subclass django_status.models.Monitor. Override the status method, which returns a value from django_status.models.STATUS.

  • There is one subclass provided, django_status.models.AgeMonitor. This is useful if you want to monitor a timedelta. Just override get_age (which should return a timedelta), warning_seconds (an integer), and problem_seconds (another integer). (These aren't instances of IntegerField in the base class, but you could certainly override them to make them so for your monitor.)

• Register your monitor class by passing it to django_status.monitor.register. For example:

    from django_status.monitors import register;
    register(MyMonitor)

  • If you put an app's Monitor subclasses in e.g. monitors.py, you can pass the entire module to register instead, e.g. in the app's init.py.
  • Registering a Monitor subclass with django_status will automatically register it in the Django admin.

• Route a URL (e.g. r'^status/$') to django_status.views.status.

• Copy the included template and CSS to the appropriate locations (or create your own). Make sure the path to status.css in your template is correct.

• Instantiate your Monitor subclass(es) via the Django admin.