Casualty - Logging with request identifiers

Tracing a request from start to end is critical for diagnosing issues quickly. This becomes hard when you have a highly concurrent system because logs are interspersed with each other. It becomes even harder when you are in the microservices architecture where a request may travel through multiple services before being complete.

In order to diagnose in such an environment, we need to have a unique identifier to tie up all the logs through different services. Casualty helps you do exactly that. It generates a unique X_CO_REQUEST_ID for every request and logs it whenever you log something from your python code base. It also propagates the id to outbound requests. If a request already has a X_CO_REQUEST_ID set in its headers, it reuses it. Hence, using Casualty, you can stitch together requests from start to end through multiple services.

Library support

Django, Flask, Requests, Celery & Kombu.

How it works

Three simple steps

• Use the provided framework specific middlewares to add the request_id (X_CO_REQUEST_ID) header to all incoming request if it is not already there
• Use structlog to bind the request_id to the logger so that the request_id is present in each log record
• Patch functions at runtime to add request_id header to all outgoing requests (celery, kombu, request)

Examples:

For configure a Flask application, add the middleware and patch outgoing request modules.

import Flask
from casualty.flask_corelation_middleware import FlaskCorelationMiddleWare
from casualty.patcher import patch


app = Flask(__name__)
app.wsgi_app = FlaskCorelationMiddleWare(app.wsgi_app)
patch(['requests']) .

patch fucntion  will automatically start adding request_id to the HTTP headers of all outbound requests.


#For Django Application ad middleware and patch request,kombu during app initialization
MIDDLEWARE = [
    'casualty.django_corelation_middleware.DjangoCorelationMiddleware' . #Use DjangoCorelationOldMiddleware for older style of Django middleware
]



Add below filter 
```casualty.filter.RequestIDFilter```
to your loggers which will add requets id to all your logs.
Something like this.

logging_conf = {
    "version": 1,
    "filters": {
        "request_id": {"()": "casualty.filter.RequestIDFilter"}
    },
    ... Your code

For Kombu consumers, patch Kombu during app initialization and add RequestIdfilter to your logs

from casualty.patcher import patch 
patch(['requests','kombu']) 

import logging

logger =logging.getLogger()

def process_message(body, message):
  logger.info("The body is {}".format(body))
  logger.info('message')
  message.ack()

For Celery consumer, note that we will need to bind the request_id and add RequestIdfilter to your logs

from casualty.patcher import patch 

patch(['requests','kombu']) 

from casualty import casualty_logger
import logging
from casualty.constants import REQUEST_HEADER

logger = logging.getLogger()
casualty_logger=casualty_logger.getLogger()

@app.task(bind=True) # bind the task
def add(self,x, y):
    #bind the requeest id to casualty .
    global casualty_logger
    casualty_logger = casualty_logger.bind(request_id=self.request.__dict__[REQUEST_HEADER])
    return x,y