Monitorize and debug your Django app like a pro with Django-Sonar

DjangoSonar is a comprehensive debugging and introspection tool for Django applications, inspired by Laravel Telescope.

I’ve never user Laravel, so I didn’t know about his Telescope debug tool, but the Django equivalent Django-Sonar is AWESOME, so Larael Telescope must be awesome too.

Let’s dig into Django-Sonar and integrate it in one of our Django Apps.

What is Django-Sonar?

In its Github page, Django-Sonar describes itself as a comprehensive debugging and introspection tool for Django applications. Pretty self explanatory :)

Django-Sonar captures and historizes realtime events like:

• Requests

• Exceptions

• Queries

• Dumps

• Authentications

• Etc.

Provides a web interface to display those captured events, for later analysis. In its traces we can get useful info about:

• Querys performed by the ORM

• Payload of get/post requests

• Session vars

• Headers,

• Etc

Those events can be also custom events, making Django-Sonar the central debug tool for our app. Very, very useful.

Installing Django-Sonar

Is very, very easy to install Django-Sonar. First, add the required dependency:

pip install django-sonar

Then, add the new app to Django’s INSTALLED_APPS, in the main settings.py:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    'django_sonar',
    ...
]

Then, add the URL mapping to the main urls.py file:

urlpatterns = [
    ...
    path('sonar/', include('django_sonar.urls')),
    ...
]

And add Django-Sonar to the middleware to enable data capturing:

MIDDLEWARE = [
  ...
  'django_sonar.middlewares.requests.RequestsMiddleware',
  ...
]

Django-Sonar will capture ALL events from our app, so is a good practive to filter some internal events to avoid excesive noise:

DJANGO_SONAR = {
    'excludes': [
        STATIC_URL,
        MEDIA_URL,
        '/sonar/',
        '/admin/',
        '/__reload__/',
    ],
}

Now all is configured. Execute the migration to create the required tables:

python manage.py migrate

Django-Sonar user interface

You will need an internal admin user to enter in Sonar’s UI. Creae it now if yoy don’t have one yet:

python manage.py createsuperuser

Then, go to the URL you configured un urls.py for Sonar:

Enter the user and password to see the realtime captured data. For this example, we have removered the filters, so ALL accesses (even the internal ones) are beign captured :)

We can see each request, ad display it’s content:

Read every performed query:

And get the details of them:

And, one ot the more interesting thing, we can write something like this in our views:

from django.shortcuts import render
from django_sonar.utils import sonar

def homeView(request):
    sonar('something from a view', request.GET, [1,2,3])
    return render(request, 'home.html')

To get the traces in Sonar:

Very, very interesting. Django-Sonar has become a must for all my Django-Projects.

About the list

Among the Python and Docker posts, I will also write about other related topics (always tech and programming topics, I promise... with the fingers crossed), like:

• Software architecture

• Programming environments

• Linux operating system

• Etc.

If you found some interesting technology, programming language or whatever, please, let me know! I'm always open to learning something new!

About the author

I'm Andrés, a full-stack software developer based in Palma, on a personal journey to improve my coding skills. I'm also a self-published fantasy writer with four published novels to my name. Feel free to ask me anything!