Summary
Monitoring tools record the result of what happened to your web application when a problem arises, but for some classes of problems, monitoring systems are only a starting point. Sometimes it is necessary to take more intrusive steps to plan for the unexpected by embedding mechanisms that will allow you to interact with a live deployed web application and extract even more detailed information.
Description
This talk will go over some of the ways in which a monitoring system such as New Relic can be used to focus in on where problems are arising in a Python web application using a framework such as Django. It will also describe how you can then use that information to drill down even further by applying separate debugging tools and techniques rather than monitoring systems. Debugging tools aren't generally associated with production systems however and even mentioning them in relation to production systems often makes DevOps people rather nervous.
The main purpose of the talk therefore is to look at a range of debugging tools and techniques which can be applied to web applications but also separate them into what might and might not be realistically used on live production web applications. It will then describe the use of an embedded interactive console port as a gateway into a live web application, how one may setup a set of predefined commands that could be issued against a live web application, or for the brave, how it could be used to fire up an embedded Python interpreter prompt or pdb session.
Topics to be touched on would include:
- Browser viewable error pages.
- Browser based debuggers.
- Python interactive debuggers.
- Post-mortem exception analysis.
- Methods for dumping Python stack traces
- Methods for dumping C stack traces.
- Methods for analyzing thread utilization.
- Interactive process introspection tools.
- Error reporting and logging services.
- Performance monitoring services.