Lightning Talk on Sentry at San Francisco's Python meetup in Feb 2010

1. Sentry
Logging for the real world
(Yes, we play StarCraft 2)
@zeeg justcramer.com

2. But really, what is it?
Self-hosted log storage
solution powered by Python
With a usable interface!

5. Why should you use it?
• It’s python, it’s open source, and it’s extensible
• Actively maintained by companies which use it
every single day
• Cheaper than commercial services
• Assuming you can handle setting up an Ubuntu
machine
• Setup takes minutes

6. Sentry 1.x
(Stable)

7. Features for Devs
• Filter messages by various attributes, such
as server, level, logger name
• Sort by priority (combination of last seen
and count), last seen, and first seen
• Mark messages as resolved when they’re no
longer applicable

8. Features for Devs
• Real-time (short polling) view of the
dashboard
• Integrated full-text search*
• Future version will only work with Solr
• Plugin architecture
* In Sentry 1.x search requires using a modified version of Haystack (for Django)

9. Client/Server
• Client:
• Can be extended within any Python framework
• Integrates with logging, LogBook*, Django
exception handling
• Server:
• Powered by Django
• Works with most database backends
* LogBook is supported with an experimental handler

10. Sentry 2.x
(In development, coming soon)

11. Wait, there’s a 2.x?
• Still in development (but we’re almost
there!)
• Not compatible with 1.x
• Platform independent
• Lots of APIs are still in draft spec

12. What else do you get?
• Support for any data store (currently using
Redis)
• We do really mean any
• No Django requirement, on the client or
server
• Frontend integration via Nexus
• github.com/dcramer/nexus

13. Flexibility!?!
• Extensible support for events
• Out of the box: SQL Queries,
Exceptions, Log Messages
• More than Python!
• Storage API allows anything an event
process can handle
• Clients can be written in any language

14. Event Storage API

15. Event Storage API

16. But wait, there’s more
• Custom dashboard panes
• Configure multiple views to aggregate events in
whatever fashion you need them
• Data annotations
• Any event can be annotated with any number of
key/value pairs.
• server=localhost,level=error,logger=root,super_
awesome_id=57

17. The Dashboard

18. ... with annotations

19. Contribute

20. How you can help
• Let us know what isn’t “good enough”
• Build a client for your favorite framework
• We will officially include clients for at minimum,
Django, Pyramid, Flask, and WSGI (middleware)
• Use it!
• The best additions have come from problems
that we’ve found using it internally

21. More
• https://github.com/dcramer/django-sentry
• branch ‘2.0’
• https://github.com/dcramer/nexus
• @zeeg
• http://justcramer.com